traitor to every ideal of civilization and of justice. It is the
instrument of hatred and of pride, the agent of jealousy and of
avarice. In the name of the dead and dying, in the name of justice,
which it dethrones, in the name of those whose loved ones it demands,
we impeach war as a traitor, guilty of all high crimes and
misdemeanors. What else shall we do? Stir up from its greatest depths
the heart of man. Educate his conscience till he is unwilling to
suffer war to exist. Begin early in Church, school, and home to instil
in the minds of young and old continually the true conception of war,
that it is an immorality, contrary to every principle of Christianity
and to every teaching of our Christ.
Let us bring into the conflict against war the great, dynamic, motive
force--the Moral Nature of Man. And when we shall have thus developed
the consciences of men, there will henceforth be laid up for us a
crown of victory, as there will then be a fuller realization that in
man's moral nature is the Hope of Universal Peace.
THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
By HAROLD HUSTED, Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas, representing the
Western Group
Fifth Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May
28, 1914
THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Age by age, civilization advances. Each successive era has contributed
that invention or accomplished that achievement which has placed
another round in the great ladder of civilization. The development of
many small states into powerful nations, and many wonderful
improvements in other fields, such as steam navigation, the railroad,
the telegraph, and wireless communication, crown the last as the
greatest of centuries in the history of the human family. It is
difficult to understand why the human mind, whence these mighty
inspirations originated, has been incapable of realizing that there
still remains the most degrading, the most deteriorating, the foulest
blot that ever disgraced this world--the killing of civilized men, by
men, as a permissible mode of settling international disputes. This
world can never attain its highest standard of civilization until this
one disgraceful blemish, called war, is obliterated. It is the
collective task of the people living in this twentieth century to
bring into reality the millennium of Tennyson,
Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
The beginning of this social task, then, is the enlightenment of the
peoples as to the immorality, waste, and ineffectiveness of war. God
commanded, "Thou shalt not kill." Who shall presume to declare that
this precept was directed not to nations but to individuals only?
that one man shall not kill, but nations may? We are horrified at the
report of a single murder, yet, if viewed from the light of truth,
what is war but wholesale murder? What tongue, what pen, can describe
the bloody havoc of the battle of Gettysburg, where, between the rise
and set of a single sun, fifty thousand of our fellow men sank to
earth, dead or wounded?
What sentiment in human hearts which needs to be perpetuated sent rank
after rank, column after column, of blue soldiers against the
impregnable stone wall of Fredericksburg? And who will place the blame
for the carnage of Cold Harbor elsewhere than upon the folly of
misguided patriotism and cruel, selfish interests that made the bloody
battle possible?
Every soldier is connected, as all of us, by dear ties of kindred,
love, and friendship. Perhaps there is an aged mother, who fondly
hoped to lean her bending form on his more youthful arm; perhaps a
young wife, whose life is entwined inseparably with his; perchance a
sister, a brother. But as he falls on the field of battle, must not
all these suffer? His aged mother surely falls with him. His young
wife is suddenly widowed, his children orphaned. That husband's
helping hand is forever stayed. A parent's voice is stilled, and the
children's plaintive cries for their loving father fall on unheeding
ears. Tell me, friends, you who know the bitterness of parting with
dear ones whom you watched tenderly through the last hopeful moments,
can you measure your anguish? Yet, what a contrast! Your dear ones
departed soothed by kindness and love, while the dying soldier gasped
out his life on the battlefield alone.
And what a waste is war! We are just beginning to realize the
tremendous cost, the incalculable wastefulness, not only of actual war
but of the preparation for future possible wars. For the current
fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, the United States has appropriated
in round numbers $535,000,000, in preparation for future wars and
because of wars fought in the past. Sixty-seven cents out of every
dollar expended by our national government goes to feed the
present-day mania for war, present and past, leaving only thirty-three
cents out of each dollar for the combined expense of the executive,
legislative, and judicial departments of our national government. When
we realize that the cost of a single battleship exceeds the total
value of all the grounds and buildings of all the colleges and
universities in the state of Kansas, the figures indicating this
expense have more meaning to us. And when we reflect that the cost of
a single shot from one of the great guns of that battleship is $1700,
enough to send a young man through college, the common man realizes
that the United States cannot afford to go to war or even prepare for
war.
And all this suffering and cost are to no purpose. War is utterly
ineffectual to secure or advance its professed object. The
wretchedness it involves contributes to no beneficial result, helps to
establish no right, and, therefore, in no respect promotes harmony
between the contending nations.
When the Saviour was born, angels from heaven sang to the children of
the human family this benediction:
Glory to God in the highest,
Peace on earth, good will toward men.
And at last, in the beginning of this twentieth century, nations seem
to be visibly approaching that unity so long hoped and prayed for; and
that nation which shall precede all others in the abolition of war
will be crowned by history with everlasting honor. The risk will be
very little, the gain incalculable.
We are coming to believe that the most significant fact about man and
his civilization is their improvability. Individual inventive genius
has added improvement after improvement until it would seem that man's
mastery over nature is to be well-nigh complete as these ideas and
inventions are socialized and extended to benefit all. We are now
entering the era of social achievement when mankind unitedly
undertakes by organization and coöperation mightier tasks than ever
accomplished before. Many dreadful diseases are disappearing before
preventive medicine, and sanitary science is eliminating many plagues;
pestilence is coming to be a thing of the past. Human welfare is now
the concern of coöperative mankind, and social science will condemn
and banish war or fail to establish itself as an applied science. It
_can_ be done! It _ought_ to be done! It _will_ be done!
And although this consummation seems to many far away, it may be
accomplished by very simple methods. It only waits the time of
concerted action on the part of the leading nations when the
principles of arbitration can be invoked more fully, and a world-court
established with plenary powers for settling all disputes between the
nations.
International legislation has occurred repeatedly, though no
world-court has as yet been established. In the case of the Universal
Postal Union we have what is tantamount to world-legislation, in that
all civilized nations have entered into a formal agreement regarding
the delivery of mail. Another instance of practical world-legislation
is that of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Many
other examples might be given in which several nations are parties to
an agreement regarding some important measure, such as the respect
paid to the flag of truce, the regulations concerning commerce on the
high seas, and the etiquette of diplomacy. Paramount in
world-importance has been the agreement of the leading nations of the
world in the establishment of the Hague conferences for the
amelioration of war.
Since a conference of nations can meet and decide on the mitigation of
the horrors of war, it is certainly conceivable that a tribunal of
nations can prevent war. Such a tribunal would in no respect differ
from the Supreme Court of the United States in its fundamental
foundations. As our Supreme Court is final in settling all disputes in
this country, so the international court would be final in adjusting
all controversies between the nations. And such a court is clearly the
next decisive step in the promotion of this great task of securing
world-peace.
If nations can agree to establish war as their arbiter of peace, why
can they not establish a more peaceful substitute? It is possible, for
there is nothing in the nature of strife that cannot be settled, no
quarrel that cannot be judged, no difficulty that cannot be
satisfactorily adjusted.
With the establishment of a true world-court, there would rise on the
vision of the nations for the first time the prospect of justice for
the united whole of mankind. Justice to the smaller countries would
be secured; encroachments by the strong upon the weak would be
prevented; the moral standard of politics would be uplifted; and
though every step would be exposed to the selfishness, corruption, and
love of despotism that are prevalent in all men, yet is it not
reasonable to suppose that, as progress is now being made in the
various nations for overcoming these evils, so it would be made in
this united whole, to the unspeakable benefit of mankind?
This country has been foremost in the promotion of this great movement
to organize the world. It is especially fitting that the United States
should take the lead. The greatest nation having a government of the
people and by the people, with the longest experience and the greatest
success, is best fitted to lead others. We have the form of national
government which foreshadows the form of world-government.
Theoretically, our states are sovereign; all rights which are not
formally surrendered by accepting the Constitution of the United
States are reserved to them. In a like manner, referring to the
establishment of a world-court, the nations individually will be
expected to surrender to the nations collectively only such
jurisdiction as pertains to the settling of their controversies.
A world-court would appeal to the strongest, the purest, and the
deepest thinkers of every race. It would cover a new field, appealing
to reason and altruism and justice. It would by its very effect upon
individuals tend to develop the qualities it demands, and would prove
a mighty influence for uplifting the intellectual and moral standards
not only of men but nations. It would by its very international nature
annihilate all national antipathies and promote an era of universal
good will and genuine understanding.
To send a husband or father, glorious in the perfection of physical
manhood, out on the field of carnage to be slain in an effort to
settle international difficulty or to uphold fancied national honor,
is unquestionable barbarism. It is far more humane to terminate
disputed questions by arbitration than by the keen-edged sword.
International peace compacts can hold mankind together by unbreakable
yet unburdensome bonds and greatly promote prosperity and social
progress. The wanton woe and waste that inevitably follow in the train
of war will soon be things of the past. The twentieth century, already
so full of radiant promise, so enlivened by a new social conscience,
will devote its collective energies to the abolition of war and the
substitution of its successor--a world-court, based on the facts of
humane solidarity and the principles of international peace.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION
By BRYANT SMITH, Guilford College, North Carolina, a Senior in
Guilford College
Prize-Winning Essay in the Pugsley Contest, 1912-1913
THE PUGSLEY PRIZE-ESSAY CONTESTS
In 1908 Mr. Chester DeWitt Pugsley, then an undergraduate student in
Harvard University, gave $50 as a prize to be offered by the Lake
Mohonk Conference for the best essay on "International Arbitration" by
an undergraduate student of an American college. The prize was won by
L. B. Bobbitt of Baltimore, a sophomore in Johns Hopkins University.
The following year (1909-1910) a similar prize, of $100, was won by
George Knowles Gardner of Worcester, Massachusetts, a Harvard
sophomore. A like prize of $100 in 1910-1911 was won by Harry Posner
of West Point, Mississippi, a senior in the Mississippi Agricultural
and Mechanical College.
The prize of 1911-1912, of which John K. Starkweather of Denver,
Colorado, a junior in Brown University, was the winner, was the first
offered to men students only (other similar prizes having been offered
to women students) in the United States and Canada.
In the fifth Pugsley contest (1912-1913) the prize was awarded to
Bryant Smith of Guilford College, North Carolina, a senior in Guilford
College at the same place, whose essay follows. The judges were
Chancellor Elmer Ellsworth Brown of New York University, Rollo Ogden,
editor of the New York _Evening Post_, and Lieutenant General Nelson
A. Miles, U.S.A., retired.
Each winner is invited to the Lake Mohonk Conference next following,
where he publicly receives the prize from its donor, Mr. Pugsley.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION
The first concerted effort looking toward an eventual world-wide peace
was the Hague Conference of 1899, where representatives of twenty-six
nations assembled in response to a rescript from the Czar of Russia,
whose avowed purpose, as set forth in the rescript, was to discuss
ways and, if possible, devise means, to arrest the alarming increase
in expenditures for armaments which threatened to bankrupt the
national governments.
Unable to accomplish anything definite in this respect because of the
vigorous opposition headed by Germany, the delegates turned their
attention toward giving official recognition and concrete form to
ideas which had already obtained in the settlement of international
disputes, and toward the formation of a court before which the nations
might have their differences adjudicated. The principles embodied in
good offices and mediation and commissions of inquiry have given
gratifying evidence of their efficiency, each in its respective
capacity. The original achievement of the conference, however, was the
Permanent Court of Arbitration. The composition of this court was to
include not more than four persons from each of the signatory powers;
from which panel, in case of an appeal to arbitration, each party was
to select two judges, who, in turn, should elect their own umpire
unless otherwise provided by the disputants. That it would be subject
to criticism might have been expected. That twenty-six nations could
unanimously agree upon any court whatever was the real occasion for
surprise. The four cases arbitrated during the eight years intervening
between this and the Second Hague Conference served to bring out its
defects, chief of which were its decentralized and intangible nature.
Nominally a court, in reality it was but a panel scattered all over
the world from which a court could, with great difficulty and expense,
be selected. Nominally permanent, in reality it had to be re-created
for each case to be judged.
The Second Hague Conference, working on a basis of this short
experience, undertook to remedy these inherent defects in the arbitral
machinery by leaving the Permanent Court just as it was, and by
creating besides an International Court of Prize to serve a special
function indicated by its name, and a court of Judicial Arbitration to
supplement the work of, if not eventually to supplant, the former
court. To insure greater impartiality and also to encourage the weaker
powers the expenses of the new court, instead of falling upon the
litigants in each case, were to be prorated among the ratifying
powers. To insure greater tangibility and permanency the new court was
to be composed of only seventeen members, each to serve a term of
twelve years at a salary of $2400 per annum, with an additional $40
for each day of actual service. Furthermore, the court was to meet
once a year and to elect each year a delegation of three of its
members to sit at The Hague for settling minor cases arising in the
interval between regular sessions, having the power also to call extra
sessions of the entire court whenever occasion should demand. To
insure a more judicial personnel the convention specifies that members
shall be qualified to hold high legal posts in their respective
countries. The method by which members of the court were to be
appointed--the one point upon which the delegates were unable to
agree--was deferred for subsequent determination.
This, in addition to the one hundred and fifty-odd treaties privately
entered into by two or more nations, many of which contain pledges to
submit certain classes of disputes to the Permanent Court, is, in
brief, what has been accomplished by way of constructive political
organization by the modern peace movement.
How much does this signify? In view of the present attitude of the
social mind, what are we to infer from this as bearing upon the
ultimate outcome of international arbitration? It shall be the purpose
of this paper to answer that question.
In an address before the Mohonk Conference of 1911 Dr. Cyrus Northrup,
ex-president of the University of Minnesota, said: "What is really
wanted is not continued talking in favor of peace with the idea of
converting the people; for the people are already converted! They are
ready for peace and arbitration!" In the October number of the _Review
of Reviews_ for 1909, Privy Councillor Karl von Stengel, one of the
German delegation to the First Hague Conference, is quoted as follows:
"It must be stated emphatically that in its ultimate aims the peace
movement is not only ... Utopian, but ... dangerous...." These
quotations are given as typical of the attitude manifested by the two
extremes, the injudiciously optimistic and the ultraconservative,
toward every social reform. All true progress pursues a course
intermediate to these two.
The idea entertained by so many enthusiastic peace advocates, that the
world is ready for peace if we but had institutional facilities
adequate to carry out the will of the people, is erroneous. In all
democratic states political institutions are but a concrete expression
of the social mind, the media created by the people, through which
society executes its will. "With a given phase of human character ...
there must go an adapted class of institutions."[1] Therefore, I
submit that if the people were ready for peace they could easily
provide the means necessary for its accomplishment.
[1] Herbert Spencer, "The Study of Sociology."
The first gentleman quoted above drew his conclusion from the
indications that of the two million inhabitants of his state, one
million nine hundred thousand would favor arbitration as shown by the
enthusiasm manifested at a meeting of the state peace society a few
weeks before. Similar conditions in other parts of the country, he
thought, would corroborate the application of his assertion to the
entire country. Such a conclusion is fallacious in that it fails to
consider three essential facts about the people of the United States
which largely determine the attitude of any people toward war. First,
they have no grievance. Second, no appeal is being made to their
patriotic bias. Third, their emotions and passions are quiescent.
The first of these needs only brief mention. No people in this
enlightened age wishes to fight as a matter of course, regardless of
any reasonable pretext. If nations never had any personal interests
involved, there would, of course, be no more war. In this respect the
people of the United States are not ahead of the other parts of the
civilized world. Disinterested parties have been in favor of peace for
two thousand years.
The other two facts deserve more extended consideration.
The disposition in individuals to pluck motes out of their neighbors'
eyes and leave beams in their own, in the nation becomes what Herbert
Spencer calls the bias of patriotism. According to him patriotism is
but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own
interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view
international affairs apart from national interests, we are
handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial
arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes
patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all
the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for
armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed
bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust
of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers'
Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to
reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the
price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize
a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted
that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the
individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question
the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with Japan,
England's course in South Africa, and America's attitude toward the
Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three
countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the
other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic
pride.
The chief respect in which this bias interferes with the progress of
international arbitration is in restricting the scope of general
arbitration treaties, the average formula of such treaties excluding
all questions which involve "national honor and vital interests." A
greatly modified survival of the spirit which in primitive peoples
regarded the tribe over the mountain or across the stream as a fit
object of hatred and fear, the objection to a judicial settlement of
such questions assumes that a nation's honor and vital interests are
goods peculiar in that they may be inconsistent with justice. The
attitude of the United States toward the recently proposed treaty
between England and America may be taken as typical of the attitude
which prevails on this subject generally. The formulators of the
treaty took an advanced step in that, instead of reserving questions
of national honor and vital interests, they provided for the
arbitration of all differences which are "justiciable in their nature
by reason of being susceptible of decision by the application of
principles of law or equity," thereby recognizing the judicial nature
of arbitration. The action of the Senate, however, which sustained the
opinion of the majority report of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, objecting to the last clause of Article III of the
treaty,[2] would indicate that the significance of a general
arbitration treaty attaches not so much to the definition of its scope
as to who shall determine what cases conform to the definition. It
would seem that the nature of the reservation is relatively
unimportant so long as its interpretation devolves upon the parties at
variance. The majority report, objecting to the delegation to the
joint high commission of the power to determine the arbitrability of
cases in terms of the treaty, contains this statement[3] in which the
minority report likewise concurs: "Every one agrees that there are
certain questions which no nation ... will ever submit to the decision
of any one else." As cases of this nature it enumerates territorial
integrity, admission of immigrants, and our Monroe Doctrine. The
significance of this insistence upon a means of evasion is evident.
There is not yet enough international confidence. The powers are not
yet ready to submit to unlimited arbitration.
[2] The clause, referring to the commission of inquiry,
reads: