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The Green Bag
spite of the great spread of learning and the great tides of travels, nations are still extraordinarily ignorant of each other. If you doubt this read American news in English or Continental papers, and, indeed, vice versa. The average Oxford graduate still believes that we are only a little less barbarous than the Tierra-del-Fuegans. Perhaps he is right. But what nations need is not so much to know a rule, or a court to which they can carry it, as to know and understand the other party to the dispute. Other obstacles to peaceable adjust ment are (2) the prevalence of an indi vidualist philosophy, leading each people to regard its rights first and its duties afterwards; and (3) the difficulty in volved in all abstract reasoning which makes it hard for men to think of duties and obligations as resting upon a people which they would concede at once to rest upon a man. The state is, after all, an abstraction. If all reasoning is difficult, abstract rea soning or reasoning about an abstraction is doubly difficult. Men who are per fectly clear as to their duties to an indi vidual and who would never think of cheating a flesh-and-blood fellow-man, are not so clear about a corporation, a municipality, or a state. Scrupulously just men ask few questions as to how a corporation has earned the dividends it pays them. The modern state itself is only just beginning to recognize duties of justice to its own citizens when they happen to be its creditors. Most of our American states still leave the public creditor to the mercy of the legislature. The conception of rights in the develop ment of the race comes much earlier than that of duties, and popular recog nition of duties to other peoples has not yet become much of a force for peace. Still another (4) obstacle to the peace able adjustment of disputes leading to
war is the popular lack of restraint, the susceptibility to the mob spirit, the love of change and newness and excitement. Governments today are popular govern ments, and, above all things, a popular government must be interesting. A dull government is lost. Passion is always more interesting than reason, and the politician who appeals to passion has many advantages over one who appeals to reason; and as questions of inter national law are also questions of politics, the tendency of all to be governed by passion rather than reason is given a freer rein in matters of international relation, and may even be stimulated by the exigencies of politics. Another (5) obstacle to peace un doubtedly did exist in the absence of any easily available means of deciding disputes of fact. This cause of war, however, now that governments have everywhere become popular govern ments, no longer exists. Wars no longer really grow out of disputes as to facts. Yet it is only this last obstacle to peace which the proposed Court could possibly hope to overcome and as to this it is unnecessary. It could not hope to over come the other obstacles named. Such a court might pass on facts and lay down rules, but in the absence of a world federation, with an effective sanc tion behind it, it could not, in my judgment, succeed except to a very limited degree. Take our American judi cial system. It is constantly strained to the utmost by the political pressure growing out of our doctrine of judicial power over unconstitutional legislation, and the fact that our polity confides so much that is really administrative, and hence political, to the courts. On two occasions the political platforms of a great party have dealt with the admin istration of justice by the courts. There is undoubtedly a growing change
