Covenants Without the Sword of popular attitude, if not dissatisfac tion, towards courts. The leaders of what is not unlikely to be the dom inant political force in the near future preach and believe that they are the victims of wrongful acts of our courts. The agitation against government by injunction in the last campaign, how ever mistaken as to facts, had a very real sentiment and not a little justifica tion behind it. The "aristocracy of the robe" is coming in for bitter criticism in quarters that have formerly been quiescent, and the effects of this are becoming daily more evident in legis lation.33 If our time-tried judicial system bends under this relatively small load of politi cal jurisdiction and interference, what may we expect of a tribunal whose whole jurisdiction is political; which has no tradition, no bar, no precedents, no sanction; which has to make ex hypothesi in large part the law it is to admin ister; which, however, will deal with political questions affording the utmost scope to passion and suspicion of preju dice? Add to this that popular im patience of restraint is an inherent diffi culty in all legal administration of jus tice, and here the whole work of the Court must be to restrain peoples at a time when their passions are likely to be aroused. Over and above the obstacles just considered, the capital hindrance to the peaceable adjustment of international disputes is the fact that the situations that lead to war today are not capable of peaceable adjustment. In the most recent of armed conflicts it is obvious that recourse to any such Court would have been out of the question. In the China-Japanese conflict the real aggres sor could not even have been summoned MSee Smith, The Spirit of American Govern ment
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to the bar; in the Spanish-American con troversy Spain certainly would never have yielded to any judgment involving her pride, sovereignty or territorial in tegrity; in the South African contest no court could ever have convinced the Boers that the progress of industrial civilization and the logic of events made a decree of annexation inevitable; in the Russo-Japanese dispute what award could any court have made which would have led Russia to abandon a policy on which she had spent half a century of effort and millions of treasure? And today what causes the alarums of war? Why for three years have Eng land and Germany had their navies con centrated within easy striking distance of each other? What casts the shadow of war upon the Pacific? Why must the United States make a spectacular dis play of naval power? Why the frantic increase of arms and armament at the very hour of our loudest peace talk? Why should the French Cabinet plan to expend $600,000,000 in naval expan sion or minor powers like Austria and Italy build half a score of Dreadnoughts? Why? Because of the perennial and inevitable question of hegemony. We must not flatter nor delude our selves that the law has settled, or per haps ever can settle, by peaceable means, this question of leadership even among individuals. Business wars are wars to the knife in which often quarter is neither asked nor given; and legisla tion and prosecution, although they have engrossed public attention for years, have made little appreciable progress in subjecting them to law. But individual strife, struggle for business hegemony among men, is surely a much simpler problem than the same struggle among nations. Besides, there are causes which make for war which partake of that element
