The Relation of the United States to the Permanent Court of International Justice

Abstract

OF course, it is obvious that at present our government and we as a people do not have any legal relation whatever to the World Court, but it is also equally clear that both as a government and as a people, we, even now, sustain a very intimate, important-it may be fateful-moral relation to that Court. It has seemed to me that this relation is so distinctly moral, as distinguished from legal, that it would have been wiser, perhaps, for the Committee on Program to have selected a doctor of divinity member of the Academy to speak on the assigned subject, rather than a lawyer. Let us consider together the origin of this moral relation and how important it promises to become to us as a nation. No government in the world has urged upon the other nations the pacific settlement of international disputes, as a national policy, with the persistence and seeming sincerity of conviction with which our government has urged it from the very beginning of our national existence. In Jay's Treaty, our earliest important international treaty, provision was made for settling three very vital subjects of difference with Great Britain by arbitration. In April, 1923, Secretary Hughes, in an address to the American Society of International Law, said that our government had been a party to more than seventy international arbitrations, and in recent years we have concluded more than a score of general arbitration conventions. When it is recalled that during the whole of the 19th century there were only about one hundred and thirty-six important international arbitrations, it is plain that it is not too much to say that, notwithstanding our several wars, our government, for more than a century and a quarter, has been the most conspicuous advocate of the pacific settlement of international disputes in all the world. However, it was arbitration in some form and not a Permanent International Court of Justice that was advocated by our government and statesmen prior to the beginning of the present century. It may, I think, be safely said that prior to the first Hague Convention in 1899 no serious proposal had been made by responsible statesmen looking to the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice. This for the re son that such a court was regarded as too great an advance upon anything theretofore achieved to be thought of as within the range of practicability.