These considerations supply the answer to the second decisive question:  How can the judgment of the Arbitration Court be enforced if any State refuses to submit to it?  Where does the power reside which insures the execution of this judgment when pronounced?

In America, Elihu Root, formerly Secretary of State, declared in 1908 that the High Court of International Justice established by the second Hague Conference would be able to pronounce definite and binding decisions by virtue of the pressure brought to bear by public opinion.  The present leaders of the American peace movement seem to share this idea.  With a childlike self-consciousness, they appear to believe that public opinion must represent the view which the American plutocrats think most profitable to themselves.  They have no notion that the widening development of mankind has quite other concerns than material prosperity, commerce, and money-making.  As a matter of fact, public opinion would be far from unanimous, and real compulsion could only be employed by means of war—­the very thing which is to be avoided.

We can imagine a Court of Arbitration intervening in the quarrels of the separate tributary countries when an empire like the Roman Empire existed.  Such an empire never can or will arise again.  Even if it did, it would assuredly, like a universal peace league, be disastrous to all human progress, which is dependent on the clashing interests and the unchecked rivalry of different groups.

So long as we live under such a State system as at present, the German Imperial Chancellor certainly hit the nail on the head when he declared, in his speech in the Reichstag on March 30, 1911, that treaties for arbitration between nations must be limited to clearly ascertainable legal issues, and that a general arbitration treaty between two countries afforded no guarantee of permanent peace.  Such a treaty merely proved that between the two contracting States no serious inducement to break the peace could be imagined.  It therefore only confirmed the relations already existing.  “If these relations change, if differences develop between the two nations which affect their national existence, which, to use a homely phrase, cut them to the quick, then every arbitration treaty will burn like tinder and end in smoke.”

It must be borne in mind that a peaceful decision by an Arbitration Court can never replace in its effects and consequences a warlike decision, even as regards the State in whose favour it is pronounced.  If we imagine, for example, that Silesia had fallen to Frederick the Great by the finding of a Court of Arbitration, and not by a war of unparalleled heroism, would the winning of this province have been equally important for Prussia and for Germany?  No one will maintain this.