In the international sphere there is no parallel to the action either of a civil or of a criminal court.  Civil and criminal jurisdiction are attributes of sovereignty, and over two independent States there is no sovereign power.  If, therefore, it is desired to institute between two States a situation analogous to that by which the subjects of a single Government are amenable to judicial tribunals, the proper way is to bring the two States under one sovereignty.  This can be effected, and is constantly effected, by one of two methods.  Either the two States federate and form a united State, or one of them conquers and annexes the other.  The former process has been seen in modern times in the formation of the United States of America:  the latter formed the substance of the history of civilisation during the first three centuries before Christ, when the Roman State successively conquered, annexed, and absorbed all the other then existing States surrounding the basin of the Mediterranean.

The history of no State justifies the belief that order and justice can successfully be maintained merely by the action of umpires and of arbitrators.  Every State worth the name has had to rely upon civil and criminal courts and upon law enforced by its authority, that is, upon a series of principles of right expressed in legislation and upon an organisation of force for the purpose of carrying those principles into practical effect.

It appears, then, that so far from the experience of States justifying the view that it is wrong to employ force, the truth is that right or law, unless supported by force, is ineffective, that the objection in principle to any use of force involves anarchy, or the cessation of the State, and that the wish to substitute judicial tribunals for war as a means of settling disputes between State and State is a wish to amalgamate under a single Government all those States which are to benefit by the substitution.

The reasonable attitude with regard to arbitration is to accept it whenever the other side will accept it.  But if the adversary refuses arbitration and insists upon using force, what course is open to any State but that of resisting force by force?

Arbitration has from the earliest times been preferred in most of those cases to which it was applicable, that is, in cases in which there was a basis of common view or common tradition sufficient to make agreement practicable.  But wherever there has been a marked divergence of ideals or a different standard of right, there has been a tendency for each side to feel that to submit its conscience or its convictions of right, its sense of what is most sacred in life, to an outside judgment would involve a kind of moral suicide.  In such cases every nation repudiates arbitration and prefers to be a martyr, in case of need, to its sense of justice.  It is at least an open question whether the disappearance of this feeling would be a mark of progress or of degeneration.  At any rate it is practically certain that the period when it will have disappeared cannot at present be foreseen.