, functions, and authority of an international
organization. They should be compared with the draft of the "Covenant"
which the President had when these proposed articles were handed to him;
the text of the President's draft appears in the Appendix (page 281).
Comparison will disclose the irreconcilable differences between the
two projects.
Of these differences the most vital was in the character of the
international guaranty of territorial and political sovereignty. That
difference has already been discussed. The second in importance was the
practical repudiation by the President of the doctrine of the equality
of nations, which, as has been shown, was an unavoidable consequence of
an affirmative guaranty which he had declared to be absolutely essential
to an effective world union. The repudiation, though by indirection, was
none the less evident in the recognition in the President's plan of the
primacy of the Great Powers through giving to them a permanent majority
on the "Executive Council" which body substantially controlled the
activities of the League. A third marked difference was in Mr. Wilson's
exaltation of the executive power of the League and the subordination of
the administration of legal justice to that power, and in my advocacy of
an independent international judiciary, whose decisions would be final
and whose place in the organization of the nations would be superior,
since I considered a judicial tribunal the most practical agency for
removing causes of war.
The difference as to international courts and the importance of applied
legal justice requires further consideration in order to understand the
divergence of views which existed as to the fundamental idea of
organization of the League.
President Wilson in his Covenant, as at first submitted to the American
Commissioners, made no provision for the establishment of a World Court
of Justice, and no reference of any sort was made to The Hague Tribunal
of Arbitration. It is not, in my opinion, a misstatement to say that the
President intentionally omitted judicial means of composing
international disputes preferring to leave settlements of that sort to
arrangement between the parties or else to the Body of Delegates or the
Executive Council, both of which bodies being essentially diplomatic or
political in their composition would lack the judicial point of view,
since their members would presumably be influenced by their respective
national intere
|