Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association Part 9

A world-court would appeal to the strongest, the purest, and the deepest thinkers of every race. It would cover a new field, appealing to reason and altruism and justice. It would by its very effect upon individuals tend to develop the qualities it demands, and would prove a mighty influence for uplifting the intellectual and moral standards not only of men but nations. It would by its very international nature annihilate all national antipathies and promote an era of universal good will and genuine understanding.

To send a husband or father, glorious in the perfection of physical manhood, out on the field of carnage to be slain in an effort to settle international difficulty or to uphold fancied national honor, is unquestionable barbarism. It is far more humane to terminate disputed questions by arbitration than by the keen-edged sword.

International peace compacts can hold mankind together by unbreakable yet unburdensome bonds and greatly promote prosperity and social progress. The wanton woe and waste that inevitably follow in the train of war will soon be things of the past. The twentieth century, already so full of radiant promise, so enlivened by a new social conscience, will devote its collective energies to the abolition of war and the subst.i.tution of its successor--a world-court, based on the facts of humane solidarity and the principles of international peace.

THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION

By BRYANT SMITH, Guilford College, North Carolina, a Senior in Guilford College

Prize-Winning Essay in the Pugsley Contest, 1912-1913

THE PUGSLEY PRIZE-ESSAY CONTESTS

In 1908 Mr. Chester DeWitt Pugsley, then an undergraduate student in Harvard University, gave $50 as a prize to be offered by the Lake Mohonk Conference for the best essay on "International Arbitration" by an undergraduate student of an American college. The prize was won by L. B. Bobbitt of Baltimore, a soph.o.m.ore in Johns Hopkins University.

The following year (1909-1910) a similar prize, of $100, was won by George Knowles Gardner of Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, a Harvard soph.o.m.ore. A like prize of $100 in 1910-1911 was won by Harry Posner of West Point, Mississippi, a senior in the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College.

The prize of 1911-1912, of which John K. Starkweather of Denver, Colorado, a junior in Brown University, was the winner, was the first offered to men students only (other similar prizes having been offered to women students) in the United States and Canada.

In the fifth Pugsley contest (1912-1913) the prize was awarded to Bryant Smith of Guilford College, North Carolina, a senior in Guilford College at the same place, whose essay follows. The judges were Chancellor Elmer Ellsworth Brown of New York University, Rollo Ogden, editor of the New York _Evening Post_, and Lieutenant General Nelson A. Miles, U.S.A., retired.

Each winner is invited to the Lake Mohonk Conference next following, where he publicly receives the prize from its donor, Mr. Pugsley.

THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION

The first concerted effort looking toward an eventual world-wide peace was the Hague Conference of 1899, where representatives of twenty-six nations a.s.sembled in response to a rescript from the Czar of Russia, whose avowed purpose, as set forth in the rescript, was to discuss ways and, if possible, devise means, to arrest the alarming increase in expenditures for armaments which threatened to bankrupt the national governments.

Unable to accomplish anything definite in this respect because of the vigorous opposition headed by Germany, the delegates turned their attention toward giving official recognition and concrete form to ideas which had already obtained in the settlement of international disputes, and toward the formation of a court before which the nations might have their differences adjudicated. The principles embodied in good offices and mediation and commissions of inquiry have given gratifying evidence of their efficiency, each in its respective capacity. The original achievement of the conference, however, was the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The composition of this court was to include not more than four persons from each of the signatory powers; from which panel, in case of an appeal to arbitration, each party was to select two judges, who, in turn, should elect their own umpire unless otherwise provided by the disputants. That it would be subject to criticism might have been expected. That twenty-six nations could unanimously agree upon any court whatever was the real occasion for surprise. The four cases arbitrated during the eight years intervening between this and the Second Hague Conference served to bring out its defects, chief of which were its decentralized and intangible nature.

Nominally a court, in reality it was but a panel scattered all over the world from which a court could, with great difficulty and expense, be selected. Nominally permanent, in reality it had to be re-created for each case to be judged.

The Second Hague Conference, working on a basis of this short experience, undertook to remedy these inherent defects in the arbitral machinery by leaving the Permanent Court just as it was, and by creating besides an International Court of Prize to serve a special function indicated by its name, and a court of Judicial Arbitration to supplement the work of, if not eventually to supplant, the former court. To insure greater impartiality and also to encourage the weaker powers the expenses of the new court, instead of falling upon the litigants in each case, were to be prorated among the ratifying powers. To insure greater tangibility and permanency the new court was to be composed of only seventeen members, each to serve a term of twelve years at a salary of $2400 per annum, with an additional $40 for each day of actual service. Furthermore, the court was to meet once a year and to elect each year a delegation of three of its members to sit at The Hague for settling minor cases arising in the interval between regular sessions, having the power also to call extra sessions of the entire court whenever occasion should demand. To insure a more judicial personnel the convention specifies that members shall be qualified to hold high legal posts in their respective countries. The method by which members of the court were to be appointed--the one point upon which the delegates were unable to agree--was deferred for subsequent determination.

This, in addition to the one hundred and fifty-odd treaties privately entered into by two or more nations, many of which contain pledges to submit certain cla.s.ses of disputes to the Permanent Court, is, in brief, what has been accomplished by way of constructive political organization by the modern peace movement.

How much does this signify? In view of the present att.i.tude of the social mind, what are we to infer from this as bearing upon the ultimate outcome of international arbitration? It shall be the purpose of this paper to answer that question.

In an address before the Mohonk Conference of 1911 Dr. Cyrus Northrup, ex-president of the University of Minnesota, said: "What is really wanted is not continued talking in favor of peace with the idea of converting the people; for the people are already converted! They are ready for peace and arbitration!" In the October number of the _Review of Reviews_ for 1909, Privy Councillor Karl von Stengel, one of the German delegation to the First Hague Conference, is quoted as follows: "It must be stated emphatically that in its ultimate aims the peace movement is not only ... Utopian, but ... dangerous...." These quotations are given as typical of the att.i.tude manifested by the two extremes, the injudiciously optimistic and the ultraconservative, toward every social reform. All true progress pursues a course intermediate to these two.

The idea entertained by so many enthusiastic peace advocates, that the world is ready for peace if we but had inst.i.tutional facilities adequate to carry out the will of the people, is erroneous. In all democratic states political inst.i.tutions are but a concrete expression of the social mind, the media created by the people, through which society executes its will. "With a given phase of human character ...

there must go an adapted cla.s.s of inst.i.tutions."[1] Therefore, I submit that if the people were ready for peace they could easily provide the means necessary for its accomplishment.

[1] Herbert Spencer, "The Study of Sociology."

The first gentleman quoted above drew his conclusion from the indications that of the two million inhabitants of his state, one million nine hundred thousand would favor arbitration as shown by the enthusiasm manifested at a meeting of the state peace society a few weeks before. Similar conditions in other parts of the country, he thought, would corroborate the application of his a.s.sertion to the entire country. Such a conclusion is fallacious in that it fails to consider three essential facts about the people of the United States which largely determine the att.i.tude of any people toward war. First, they have no grievance. Second, no appeal is being made to their patriotic bias. Third, their emotions and pa.s.sions are quiescent.

The first of these needs only brief mention. No people in this enlightened age wishes to fight as a matter of course, regardless of any reasonable pretext. If nations never had any personal interests involved, there would, of course, be no more war. In this respect the people of the United States are not ahead of the other parts of the civilized world. Disinterested parties have been in favor of peace for two thousand years.

The other two facts deserve more extended consideration.

The disposition in individuals to pluck motes out of their neighbors'

eyes and leave beams in their own, in the nation becomes what Herbert Spencer calls the bias of patriotism. According to him patriotism is but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view international affairs apart from national interests, we are handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers'

Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with j.a.pan, England's course in South Africa, and America's att.i.tude toward the Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic pride.

The chief respect in which this bias interferes with the progress of international arbitration is in restricting the scope of general arbitration treaties, the average formula of such treaties excluding all questions which involve "national honor and vital interests." A greatly modified survival of the spirit which in primitive peoples regarded the tribe over the mountain or across the stream as a fit object of hatred and fear, the objection to a judicial settlement of such questions a.s.sumes that a nation's honor and vital interests are goods peculiar in that they may be inconsistent with justice. The att.i.tude of the United States toward the recently proposed treaty between England and America may be taken as typical of the att.i.tude which prevails on this subject generally. The formulators of the treaty took an advanced step in that, instead of reserving questions of national honor and vital interests, they provided for the arbitration of all differences which are "justiciable in their nature by reason of being susceptible of decision by the application of principles of law or equity," thereby recognizing the judicial nature of arbitration. The action of the Senate, however, which sustained the opinion of the majority report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, objecting to the last clause of Article III of the treaty,[2] would indicate that the significance of a general arbitration treaty attaches not so much to the definition of its scope as to who shall determine what cases conform to the definition. It would seem that the nature of the reservation is relatively unimportant so long as its interpretation devolves upon the parties at variance. The majority report, objecting to the delegation to the joint high commission of the power to determine the arbitrability of cases in terms of the treaty, contains this statement[3] in which the minority report likewise concurs: "Every one agrees that there are certain questions which no nation ... will ever submit to the decision of any one else." As cases of this nature it enumerates territorial integrity, admission of immigrants, and our Monroe Doctrine. The significance of this insistence upon a means of evasion is evident.

There is not yet enough international confidence. The powers are not yet ready to submit to unlimited arbitration.

[2] The clause, referring to the commission of inquiry, reads:

"It is further agreed, however, that in cases in which the Parties disagree as to whether or not a difference is subject to arbitration under Article I of this Treaty, that question shall be submitted to the Joint High Commission of Inquiry; and if all or all but one of the members of the Commission agree and report that such difference is within the scope of Article I, it shall be referred to arbitration in accordance with the provisions of this treaty."--_Editor._

[3] See Senate Doc.u.ment 98, 62d Cong., 1st Sess., 9-10.--_Editor._

The other enemy to rational judgment--and rational judgment must be the only basis of arbitration--is the danger of emotionalism. The average man is yet largely irrational. When cool and self-possessed, and when his prejudices and traditions do not interfere, he can pa.s.s rational judgment upon questions in which his own interests are not concerned; but when his pa.s.sions are aroused he dispenses with any effort to reason and acts in obedience to blind impulse. He knows that it is expensive to fight, that it is dangerous, and that it is wrong; but when he is provoked, he fights. The characteristics of the average man are the characteristics of society. We have not yet outgrown the mob.

Interwoven with this impulsive temperament and a.s.sociated with some of the most cherished affections of the human heart is the spirit of war, developed by thousands of generations of ancestral conflict and pa.s.sed on to us as a heritage to be rooted out of our nature before we shall realize in its fullness the ideal for which we strive. Mortal conflict sanctified by religion, devastation idealized by literature, pillage justified by patriotism, fellow-destruction enn.o.bled by self-sacrifice--these form a complex of contradictory emotions from which men are as yet unable to unravel the one essential characteristic of war; namely, the attempt to dispense justice in a trial by battle, and make it stand out in its revealed inconsistency, dissociated from its traditional concomitants of which it is neither part nor parcel. The romance of knighthood and chivalry still appeals to the human heart, notwithstanding the fact that war, love, and religion, the knight's creed, are an inconsistent combination. Most men can be made to see this in their minds, but cannot be made to feel it in their souls. Many old Civil War veterans, who would not consent for their sons to volunteer in the Spanish-American War, would have gone themselves had they been able. Some did go. To men so disposed it is useless to talk of the horrors of war. Give us a just grievance; let some competent enthusiast inflame this pa.s.sion with a war cry like "Remember the Maine," "Fifty-four forty or fight," "Liberty or death,"

and, reenforced by the animal inherent in man, it will arouse popular demonstrations devoid of all reason, creating a force that cannot be controlled by a cold, calculating intellect. Can you listen to a bugle call on a clear, still night without a quickening of the pulse as there flashes through your soul a suggestion of all past history with its marshaling hosts and heroic deeds? Can you see a military parade without a suggestion of "Dixie" and the Star Spangled Banner, or feeling your bosom swell with patriotic pride? This a.s.sociation may be, and doubtless is, a delusion, but it is a delusion developed and fortified by thousands of years of custom and precedent and it would be contrary to the history of human progress if man should become disillusionized in one generation. It may take centuries. If we are to have international arbitration in the near future, we must have it in spite of this spirit of war rather than by destroying the spirit. In fact, the only practical way to destroy it is to let it, like vestigial organs of which biologists tell us, degenerate from disuse.

This inherited emotional tendency remains as a threat with which we, as exponents of arbitration, must reckon before we are justified in saying that the world is ready for peace.

Because of these two social characteristics--the patriotic bias which perverts judgment, and uncontrolled pa.s.sions which submerge reason--the educational propagandists still have a task to perform.

Let us now examine the stand-pat idea that unlimited arbitration is but a dream as expressed in the quotation from Privy Councillor Stengel. This is farther from the truth than the other extreme just discussed. He who will, with an unprejudiced mind, examine cross sections of history at widely separated stages, cannot fail to see that along with the growing tendency of reason to predominate over pa.s.sion, superst.i.tion, and custom there has been a parallel tendency to restrict militarism as a social activity. From a war conceived as religion to war as patriotism, then war as commercialism and the tool of ambition, man is now coming to the more rational conception of war as the despoiler of nations. David speaks of the "season of the year"

when nations went forth to battle. Fifteen hundred years later governments pretended at least to justify their military operations on rational grounds. To-day war is the last resort, and even its most ardent defenders do not attempt to justify it except in disputes which involve national honor and vital interests.

In view of the foregoing facts it is evident that the modern peace movement has by no means the whole of the task to perform. Rather, we can almost justify ourselves in the a.s.sumption that war is not long to remain one of our social inconsistencies and that it is now making its last, and, therefore, most determined, stand on questions of national honor and vital interests.

Among the numerous forces contributing to this evolution of international peace, the chief agencies have been, and still are, moral and industrial. These same forces are working to-day with c.u.mulative effect.

Warfare is becoming more and more inconsistent with the ethical spirit of the times. Men may talk of the expenses, horrors, and devastations of war as paramount causes for the tendency to subst.i.tute arbitration; but antedating all other causes, underlying and strengthening all others, is the slowly changing social conscience which, as each generation pa.s.ses, appreciates more fully warfare's inconsistency with justice and antagonism to right. This same cause found civilized society taking keen delight in the heathen barbarity of a gladiatorial combat, and has transformed and lifted it up to where it is horrified at a bull-baiting or a prize fight. It found human beings with absolute power of life and death over other human beings and has evolved the view that all men are created free and equal. It found individuals settling questions of honor by a resort to arms, and has subst.i.tuted therefor a judge, counsel, and a jury. These three inst.i.tutions--gladiatorial combats, slavery, and dueling--were no more regarded in their day as only temporary phenomena of social evolution than is war so regarded by military sympathizers of to-day; yet these have one by one been eliminated, and war is fast becoming as much out of harmony with the ethical spirit of this age as was each of the above out of harmony with the spirit of the age which dispensed with it, and the effort to demonstrate that war is just as dispensable is meeting with success. The teachings of Christ, who two thousand years ago announced the doctrine of human brotherhood and surrendered his life to make this doctrine effective, have slowly but surely wrought their leavening influence upon the source of all war; namely, the hearts of men. Warfare has for centuries been gradually yielding to this deepening consciousness and that it must eventually, if not soon, take its place beside the long-discarded gladiatorial profession, the outlawed slave trade, and the discountenanced custom of the duelist must be evident to any one who takes more than a superficial view of the great determining forces which shape human progress.

Besides moral forces, industrial forces were mentioned as a factor tending to the adoption of arbitration. During recent times, under the impetus caused by the relatively modern innovations of steam, electricity, and the press, this cla.s.s of causes has been unusually effective. Industry has overstepped international boundary lines.

Through the division of labor we are pa.s.sing from the independence of nations to the interdependence of nations. International banking, transportation, and commerce, by establishing communities of interest in all parts of the world, are binding the peoples of the earth into one great industrial organization. As striking evidence of this development, more than one hundred and fifty international a.s.sociations[4] and more than thirty-five international unions of states have been formed. The modern intricate system of communication is a veritable nervous system which, in the event of any local paralysis or upheaval, informs the entire industrial organism. The figure is no longer "the shot heard, round the world," but becomes "the pulse-beat felt, round the world." If Spencer's definition of patriotism--that is, coextensive with personal interests--is correct, the bias of patriotism cannot r.e.t.a.r.d the progress of arbitration much longer, for patriotism will be a world-wide feeling, since personal interests are no longer restricted to nationality.

[4] "Annuaire de la Vie Internationale," 1910-1911, reports on 510.--_Editor._

No, Herr Stengel, each pa.s.sing year finds the causes which make for war weakened and the causes which make for arbitration proportionately reenforced. The skeptics are the dreamers and the peace workers are the practical men of affairs.

From the foregoing synopsis of the technical accomplishments of the modern peace movement to date, and from the effort to interpret their significance in the light of fundamental social characteristics and the present social att.i.tude, I trust three things have become evident:

_First._ The movement for international peace through arbitration, far from being a mere bubble on the surface of society to be burst by the first war cloud which appears on the horizon, is a movement, centuries old, coincident with social evolution, deep-rooted in the very nature of a developing world-wide civilization.

_Second._ International peace through arbitration is not to be a ready-made affair, coming in on the crest of some wave of popular enthusiasm as was expected by many in 1899.

_Third._ Being an outgrowth of the natural laws of human development, a result so much deeper and more fundamental than political laws can produce, international peace through arbitration may be furthered, but cannot be accomplished, by legislation; may be delayed, but cannot be prevented, by the neglect to legislate. To undertake to hasten arbitration by forcing legislative proceedings beyond what the people will indorse, would be as futile as to turn up the hands of the clock to hasten the pa.s.sage of time.