Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/527

 496

The Green Bag

bers saw the solution of war in a "Con gress of Nations." At their first meet ing in 1828 they arranged a prize competition for essays on this subject. In 1840 they put out a plan for a Con gress of Nations and a Court of Nations —the Court to be "permanent like the Supreme Court of the United States." This Court was to act as "conservators of the peace of Christendom," and watch over the welfare of mankind both of the nations of the confederacy and the world at large. Where it could not decide authoritatively it was to offer to mediate. And mediation, or some form of international organization pro viding the machinery or the excuse for mediation, I may say in passing, seems to me probably to be the only method of outside interference in a given dis pute which is capable of much practical development or usefulness.6 In 1880 Sheldon Amos, an English lawyer, sometime Professor in the Uni versity of London, wrote a book entitled "Legal and Political Remedies for War," in which, briefly, he argues for an Inter national Court, permanently constituted, as an aid to diplomacy in that it fur nishes a means of "obtaining a ready and immediate decision of questions of law and fact which from time to time come into controversy." But Professor Amos, as a practical lawyer, recognizes that much more than such a Court is needed,—that it is at most a mere incident. "The main and only hope," he says, "for maintaining throughout large populations a balance of mind and moral self-restraint in the presence of irritating instruments and diplomatic controversies is to be found in such a popular training as shall bring the brutal passions of an associated crowd under exactly the same chronic 'Darby, International Tribunals, 231. Essay of A. P. Sprague (1876), Darby 225.

discipline as the civilized individual man, not to say the Christian, has long learned to exercise in the control of his. own spirit."7 In 1887 Leone Levi, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, published a draft project of a "Council and High Court of Inter national Arbitration." His fourteenth proposition, as revised by Lord Hobhouse, reads:— "It is not contemplated to provide for the exercise of physical force in order to secure reference to the council, or to compel com pliance with the award of the court when made. The authority of the council is moral, not physical. Nevertheless, when the award of its regularly approved court is set at naught by the contending parties, it shall be the duty of the council to communicate the facts of the case and the award of the court thereon to all the states represented in the same." In other words, if its decision was dis regarded, the court could protest. "My Lord," said Mr. Hunt, in a wellknown legal anecdote, "I desire only to protest." "Oh! is that all?" said Lord Ellenborough. "By all means protest and go about your business." "So Mr. Hunt protested and went about his business, and my lord went unruffled to his dinner, and both parties were con tent."9 During the last few years we have had the ambitious efforts of the Inter parliamentary Union, the plan of Sir Edmund Hornby,10 the proposition sub mitted to the Universal Peace Con ference at Chicago, in 1893, by William Allen Butler, Dorman B. Eaton and 'See also Scheme proposed in Lorimer's "Insti tutes of the Law of Nations," II, 279-287 (1884) which, although it has provision for a judiciary, is chiefly political. See also Molinari's Scheme for a "League of Neutral Powers" (1887), which is also a political solution. See Maine, International Law, Lect. 12. 'Darby, International Tribunals, 60. See also the same proposition differently worded in Levi, International Law, 273. •Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices, 3d ed., vol. 4, page 303. "Darby, 188.