existing and confined to them. This treaty made arbitration applicable to all matters not affecting “national honour or vital interests.” Since then a network of similar treaties, adopted by different nations with each other and based on the Anglo-French model, has made reference to the Hague Court of Arbitration practically compulsory for all matters which can be settled by an award of damages or do not affect any vital national interest.
The third Hague Conference is timed to be held in 1917. Meanwhile a conference of the maritime powers was held in London in 1908-1909 for the elaboration of a code of international maritime law in time of war, to be applied in the international Court of Prize, which had been proposed in a convention signed ad referendum at the Hague Conference of 1907.
A further development in the common efforts which have been made by different powers to assure the reign of justice and judicial methods among the states of the world was the proposal of Secretary Knox of the United States to insert in the instrument of ratification of the International Prize Court Convention (adopted at the Hague in 1897) a clause stating that the International Prize Court shall be invested with the duties and functions of a court of arbitral justice, such as recommended by the first Voeu of the Final Act of the conference. The object of this proposal was to give effect to the idea that the existing “permanent” court lacked the essential characteristics of national courts of justice in not being ready at all times to hear cases, and in needing to be specially constituted for every case submitted to it. The new court would be permanently in session at the Hague, the full panel of judges to assemble in ordinary or extraordinary session once a year.
Thus, while armaments are increasing, and wars are being fought out in the press and in public discussion, the great powers are steadily working out a system of written law and establishing a judiciary to adjust their differences in accordance with it.[1]
The Current Grouping of Mankind and Nation-making. — In the consolidation of peace one of the most important factors is unquestionably the grouping of mankind in accordance with the final territorial and racial limitations of their apparent destiny. Language has played a vital part in the formation of Germany and Italy. The language question still disturbs the tranquillity of the Near East. The Hungarian government is regarded by the Slav, Ruman and German inhabitants of the monarchy as an oppressor for endeavouring to force everybody within the realm to learn the Magyar language. The “Young Turkish” government has problems to face which will be equally difficult, if it insists on endeavouring to institute centralized government in Turkey on the French model.
Whereas during the 19th century states were being cut out to suit the existing distribution of language, in the 20th the tendency seems to be to avoid further rearrangement of boundaries, and to complete the homogeneity, thus far attained, by the artificial method of forcing reluctant populations to adopt the language of the predominant or governing race. In the United States this artificial method has become a necessity, to prevent the upgrowth of alien communities, which might at some later date cause domestic trouble of a perilous character. For example, when a community of French Canadians, discontented with British rule, many years ago migrated and settled in Massachusetts, they found none of the tolerance they had been enjoying in Canada for their French schools and the French language they wished to preserve. In Alsace-Lorraine German-speaking immigrants are gradually displacing, under government encouragement, the French-speaking population. Poland is another case of the difficulty of managing a population which speaks a language not that of the governing majority, and Russia, in trying to solve one problem by absorbing Finland into the national system, is burdening herself with another which may work out in centuries of unrest, if not in domestic violence. Not very long ago Pan-Germans were paying much attention to the German settlers in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul, where large villages spoke nothing but German, and German, as the only language known on the spot, had become the tongue in which municipal business was transacted. The Brazilian government, in view of the danger to which such a state of things might give rise, followed the example of the United States in dealing with the language question.
Thus while in the one case homogeneity of language within state boundaries seems to be one of the conditions making for peace, the avoidance of interference with a well-marked homogeneous area like Finland would seem to contribute equally to the same end.
Meanwhile the difficulties in the way of contemporary nation-making are fostered by many extraneous influences, as well as by dogged resistance of the races in question. Not the least important of these influences is the sentimental sympathy felt for those who are supposed to be deprived of the use of their mother-tongue, and who are subjected to the hardship of learning an alien one. The hardship inflicted on those who have to learn a second language is very easily exaggerated, though it is to be regretted that in the case of Hungary the second language is not .one more useful for international purposes.
Contemporary Statecraft. — Nation-making has hitherto been more or less unconscious the outcome of necessity, a natural growth due to the play of circumstance and events. But in our own age conscious statecraft is also at work, as in Canada, where the genius of statesmen is gradually endowing that dominion with all the attributes of independence and power. Australia has not learnt the lesson of Canada in vain. Whatever value may attach to the consolidation of the British Empire itself as a factor in spreading the peace which reigns within it, it is also a great contribution to the peace of the world that the British race should have founded practically independent states like the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the South African Union and the Dominion of New Zealand. These self-governing colonies with their spheres of influence, with vast areas still unpeopled, have a future before them which is dissociated from the methods of an over-peopled Europe, and among them the preservation of peace is the direct object and condition of their progressive development. Like the United States, they have or will have their Monroe doctrine. Colonized by the steady industrial peoples of northern Europe, there is no danger of the turbulence of the industrially indolent but more passionate peoples of Central and South America. As in Europe, these northern peoples will hold the power which intelligent democracies are consciously absorbing, and the British faculty for statecraft is gradually welding new nations on the British model, without the obsolete traditions and without that human sediment which too frequently chokes the currents of national vitality in the older communities of Europe.
Militarism. — It is often stated, as if it were incontrovertible, that conscription and large standing armies are a menace to peace, and yet, although throughout the civilized world, except in the British Empire and the United States, conscription is the system employed for the recruiting of the national forces of both defence and offence, few of these countries show any particular disposition to make war. The exceptional position of the United States, with a population about equal to that of the rest of the American continent, and of Great Britain, an island state but little exposed to military invasion, places both beyond absolute need of large standing armies, and renders an enlisting system feasible which would be quite inadequate for the recruitment of armies on the French or German scale. Democratic progress on the Continent has, however, absorbed
- ↑ Schemes of thinkers, like William Penn's European Parliament (1693); the Abbé St Pierre's elaboration (c. 1700) of Henry IV.'s “grand design” (see supra); Jeremy Bentham's International Tribunal (1786-1789); Kant's Permanent Congress of Nations and Perpetual Peace (1796); John Stuart Mill's Federal Supreme Court; Seeley's, Bluntschli's, David Dudley Field's, Professor Leone Levi's, Sir Edmund Hornby's co-operative schemes for promoting law and order among nations, have all contributed to popularizing in different countries the idea of a federation of mankind for the preservation of peace.
