but the problem must be worked out in an effective manner through the good judgment and the capacity for accomplishing results of those in charge. In this, as in other things, something must be left to time and the process of natural development."

IV

VEERING OF OPINION

All the existing institutions at The Hague are voluntary: that is to say, nations may or may not resort to them, as they see fit. The advocates of the new World Court provided for by The Hague Convention under the name of the Court of Arbitral Justice almost to a man believed that this new institution should likewise be purely voluntary in character. They discouraged the idea of the use of force to hale nations into Court, or to execute the judgment of the Court, as not only unnecessary but harmful. Men pointed to a whole series of arbi

trations through the greater part of a century, none of which had been thrown down by the refusal of one party alone. to abide by the award, and asserted that the sense of honourable obligation, backed by the pressure of public opinion, was sufficient not only to insure the acceptance of the awards of international tribunals but to lead the progressive nations habitually to resort to this method of settling disputes in lieu of war. True, in the past few years, several of the backward countries of Latin America had thrown down arbitrations, thus breaking the splendid record of a century. But it was felt that this illustrated less a failure of principle than the actual condition of the peoples in question, peoples who ought never to have been expected to apply successfully such advanced methods.

With the beginning of the present war this reliance on voluntary institutions suffered a fatal shock. It was plain that the efforts of the Entente to

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refer the Austro-Serbian dispute to a conference, efforts initiated by Viscount (then Sir Edward) Grey and supplemented by France, Italy and Russia, were brought to nought by Germany simply because Germany had decided that the time was ripe once again to set in motion its great military machine, and that it had selected a moment to precipitate war when it was Austria's quarrel so that Austria could be counted upon with certainty as an ally.

An important line of progress in the history of war has been the tendency to spare the non-combatant and confine the conflict to the armed forces of the belligerents. These helpful rules of war, so painfully bought by experience and laboriously worked out through generations of endeavour, Germany threw to the winds. And she did not stop there. Deeds which men, relying upon the common dictates of humanity, thought it wholly unnecessary specifically to forbid,

were done, not in the heat of battle, but deliberately as part of a conscious policy.

To many men the crimes committed in this war, the very assault itself, were, before the event, simply unthinkable. The whole philanthropic movement of the twentieth century and the advanced outlook of men seemed to belie their possibility. This made the shock only the greater when the scales fell from men's eyes. Many men who had hitherto opposed the use of force in the relations of States were at once convinced that it must, after all, be injected into international institutions.

The League to Enforce Peace owes its existence to that change of attitude. The men working with the Judicial Settlement Society and men outside of its ranks who had shown an active interest in a better international organization joined hands in the endeavour to make a repetition of such an assault on the

world's peace more difficult in future. Prominent in the latter group was Mr. Hamilton Holt. In May, 1911, Mr. Holt had read a paper at Baltimore on the subject of a league of peace.5 As originally drafted, the paper embraced the sanction of force. That feature was omitted after consultation by its author with the leading proponents of a World Court who, it will be remembered, put their faith in the development of voluntary institutions in the belief that nations would use them without other inducement than a clear-eyed perception of their own interests.

The main recommendations then left in Mr. Holt's paper related to an obligation on the part of the League to arbitrate "all disputes of whatsoever character," to use the Hague Court or such other similar tribunals as may be constituted, and to institute " a periodical convention or assembly to make all rules for the League, such rules to become law unless vetoed by a nation within