submit disputes to
international tribunals, shows how powerful the motives for avoiding war
are nowadays becoming. But the fact, also, that no country hitherto has
abandoned its liberty of withdrawing from peaceful arbitration any
question involving "national honour" shows that there is no constituted
power strong enough to control large states. For the reservation of
questions of national honour from the sphere of law is as absurd as
would be any corresponding limitation by individuals of their liability
for their acts before the law; it is as though a man were to say: "If I
commit a theft I am willing to appear before the court, and will
probably pay the penalty demanded; but if it is a question of murder,
then my vital interests are at stake, and I deny altogether the right of
the court to intervene." It is a reservation fatal to peace, and could
not be accepted if pleaded at the bar of any international tribunal with
the power to enforce its decisions. "Imagine," says Edward Jenks, in his
_History of Politics_, "a modern judge 'persuading' Mr. William Sikes to
'make it up' with the relatives of his victim, and, on his remaining
obdurate, leaving the two families to fight the matter out." Yet that is
what was in some degree done in England until medieval times as regards
individual crimes, and it is what is still done as regards national
crimes, in so far as the appeal to arbitration is limited and voluntary.
The proposals, therefore--though not yet accepted by any
Government--lately mooted in the United States, in England, and in
France, to submit international disputes, without reservation, to an
impartial tribunal represent an advance of peculiar significance.

The abolition of collective fighting is so desirable an extension of the
abolition of individual fighting, and its introduction has waited so
long the establishment of some high compelling power--for the influence
of the Religion of Peace has in this matter been less than nil--that it
is evident that only the coincidence of very powerful and peculiar
factors could have brought the question into the region of practical
politics in our own time. There are several such factors, most of which
have been developing during a long period, but none have been clearly
recognized until recent years. It may be worth while to indicate the
great forces now warring against war.

(1) _Growth of International Opinion._ There can be no doubt whatever
that during recent year