“My colleague, Prof.  John Bassett Moore, is now preparing and publishing a series of annotated reports of the international arbitration tribunals, in order that the Governments and jurists of the world may have at hand, as they have in the United States Supreme Court, reports, a record of decided cases which, when the time comes, may be referred to as precedents.

“It will be through graded processes such as this that the great end will be accomplished.  Beginning with such annotated reports as a basis for precedents, each new case tried before this tribunal will add a further precedent, and presently a complete international code will be in existence.  It was in this way that the English common law was built, and such has been the admirable history of the work done by our own judicial system.

“The study of such problems is at this time infinitely more important than the consideration of how large a fine shall be inflicted by the victors upon the vanquished.”

The Chief Result.

“There is the probability of some dislocation of territory and some shiftings of sovereignty after the war ends, but these will be of comparatively minor importance.  The important result of this great war will be the stimulation of international organization along some such lines as I have suggested.

“Dislocation of territory and the shifting of sovereigns as the result of international disagreements are mediaeval practices.  After this war the world will want to solve its problems in terms of the future, not in those of the outgrown past.

“Conventional diplomacy and conventional statesmanship have very evidently broken down in Europe.  They have made a disastrous failure of the work with which they were intrusted.  They did not and could not prevent the war because they knew and used only the old formulas.  They had no tools for a job like this.

“A new type of international statesman is certain to arise, who will have a grasp of new tendencies, a new outlook upon life.  Bismarck used to say that it would pay any nation to wear the clean linen of a civilized State.  The truth of this must be taught to those nations of the world which are weakest in morale, and it can only be done, I suppose, as similar work is accomplished with individuals.  Courts, not killings, have accomplished it with individuals.

“One more point ought to be remembered.  We sometimes hear it said that nationalism, the desire for national expression by each individual nation, makes the permanent peace and good order of the world impossible.

“To me it seems absurd to believe that this is any truer of nations than it is of individuals.  It is not each nation’s desire for national oppression which makes peace impossible; it is the fact that thus far in the world’s history such desire has been bound up with militarism.

“The nation whose frontier bristles with bayonets and with forts is like the individual with a magazine pistol in his pocket.  Both make for murder.  Both in their hearts really mean murder.