The
Volume XXI
Green
Bag
October, 1909
Number 10
Covenants Without the Sword* By Omer F. Hershey, of the Baltimore Bar I UNIVERSAL empire did not bring universal peace; and the civilized world today is too wide for universal empire, if, indeed, it will tolerate empire at all. A universal church did not bring universal peace, although it was a church dedicated to peace and to good will; and today human reason is too varied and too militant to yield to a universal church. The cry of humanity for social justice and human brother hood has grown more and more uni versal; but the dream of the prophet, that nation shall not lift up sword against nation and shall learn war no more, is answered^ still by the tramp, tramp, tramp of countless soldiers and the frantic building of priceless Dread noughts. But what the Hebrew prophet and Greek philosopher and Roman em peror of antiquity failed to do, and what the priest and poet and statesman of our day have only been able to realize in their dreams, we are now told the lawyer is about to accomplish. A universal legal tribunal, a "High Court of Justice of the World," a "Su preme Court of the Nations," an "Inter national Court of Arbitral Justice" is now to succeed where other movements • Read at the meeting of the Maryland State Bar Association, at Old Point Comfort, Va., July 9, 1909.
failed. Humanity is about to make its judicial appearance in the world. In the grandiloquent phrases of the Bar Association of New York in their peti tion to President Cleveland shortly after his Venezuelan scare, praying that he "serve the cause of humanity" by favor ing such a Court, we are now about "to compass the realization of the dream of good men in every period of the world's history, when nations shall learn war no more and enlightened reason shall fight the only battles fought among the children of men." Enlightened reason, which is often benighted unreason, human passion, human prejudice, the envies, the jealousies, the rivalries, the ambitions, the perversities of diverse people, which would not give in to the Universal Em peror nor bow to the Universal Church, are expected to yield gracefully and contentedly to the decrees of a Uni versal Court. Let but a legal rule exist and a legal tribunal be established to expound and apply it, and humanity, which has been deaf to the preacher and blind to the philosopher, will hear the law and read the decree and humbly obey. Like the Roman praetor, this great Court will interpose its vim fieri veto, and a law-abiding, justice-loving world, lawless only through ignorance
