naval estimate for the British navy for 1907 as $40,500,000, for new construction as against $46,175,000, for 1906.

With such enormous sums annually spent and under existing circumstances properly spent, by the nations of the world in maintaining their armaments, surely no nation could object on the score of economy to contribute its pittance of $20,000 a year to the good work of establishing and maintaining a permanent court of international arbitration and thereby advancing the cause and prospects of international arbitration as a substitute for public war.

Hence the objection to this plan that it would be a costly experiment is too trivial to be entertained for a moment. A single decision in the first case referred to the tribunal avoiding the war that might otherwise have arisen would save enough money as compared with the cost of that war to run the court for many years. For instance: take the arbitration at the Hague over the question whether the claimed preference of the blockading creditor nations of Venezuela over the pacific creditor nations in the payment out of the customs receipts of that country, was proper under the circumstances. Had that question been submitted to the arbitrament of a general European war, the cost would have been incalculable; not to mention the crime. against civilization which would have been thus perpetrated.

As we maintain a great navy in idleness and rightly do not count the cost in view of its priceless value at the crucial moment, so should we maintain, if necessary, a great international court in idleness, if you please, so that it shall be ready for action at the crucial moment and thus prevent the war that might otherwise arise. The cost is therefore a negligible quantity. It would be expensive, but war is so much more expensive that the two are not to be mentioned in one breath. As well weigh a mote against the moon.

Again, the advantage of having a court fully organized prepared and ready to do business, and which, in the course of time, through its wise decisions, would obtain a hold upon the imaginations of men-not possible in the case of a fleeting, evanescent tribunal, would be an inestimable advantage.

Men are so prone to take the line of least resistance.

Again, such a permanent court would soon begin to develop an international law of precedents whose value, as a mode of settling

disputes without recourse either to war or arbitration, would be priceless.

And as in the case of municipal law when the court makes a wrong departure-wrong in the eyes of the legislature-a statute remedies the defect; so if decisions were made offensive to the sense of justice-or interests of the great nations-a council of the great nations could change it by resolution; or any particular nation may refuse to arbitrate before the court except pursuant to a protocol eliminating the objectionable ruling.

Thus and thus only will be obtained the nearest approach to human perfection in the establishment and maintenance of a system of international arbitration.

Pending the realization of this great end, public opinion should be educated to stigmatize as a crime the appointment on an international arbitration of any but the most highly trained experts-men fitted in every sense duly to discharge the important duties of their high officemen of sound sense and well balanced minds-men, in a word, of the true judicial temperament.

A PROSPECT

As perjury was the drawback to trial by jury which rendered possible the survival of private war and its daughter, trial by battle, far into the Middle Ages, and up to a time whose civilization was otherwise unfitted for its continuance, so unfit men as arbitrators and the evanescent character of the courts so constituted are the drawbacks which are now weighing heavily against international arbitration in its struggle for existence against public war.

All lovers of peace and humanity who desire that in this struggle between two institutions the system of international arbitration shall ultimately survive, must lend their energies to the establishment of that system upon the best possible foundations in order that it shall become the fittest to survive in the environment.

The Hague tribunal is a great advance. But, as shown, it is defective as now constituted. It needs to be reorganized and made a permanent tribunal in the manner suggested.

Let us then have a permanent court at the Hague and always open for business, composed of a limited number of judges with fixed tenure of office during good behavior and fixed salaries, residing at the Hague.

Let private claims be submitted to this tribunal as a matter of course on the suggestion of the chancelleries of the nations interested. What divinity doth hedge about a king? Why should not sovereignties answer at such times and places for their alleged misdeeds?

Let this court be ready at all times for the hearing and decision of great public questions when and as submitted by the sovereignties involved in them.

So will be constituted a true permanent court of international arbitration, a true international judiciary from which will spring a true system of international law.

R. FLOYD CLARKE.

THE GENEVA CONVENTION OF 1906

The members of the congress of Vienna who, for the most part, directed the international politics of Europe for the first half of the nineteenth century, have never been accounted as exponents of liberal thought, or as the advocates of liberal policies. But it must be said in behalf of their narrow and, at times, reactionary statesmanship, that it kept the peace in western Europe during the period intervening between the battle of Waterloo, which terminated the military and political activity of the first Napoleon, and the appearance of his nephew in the rôle of a military commander in the Italian campaign of 1859. For the first time in recorded history it was given to the harassed inhabitants of the Rhine provinces to see a full half century of peace, and to enjoy so much as fifty years of fortunate and uninterrupted immunity from the hardships and sacrifices of war.

The operations in the Crimea, which abounded in inefficiency and mismanagement, had been carried on in a distant and inaccessible region, but the theater of the campaign of 1859 was in northern Italy, an area so accessible from all parts of western Europe that it instantly filled with curious observers, who desired to see at first hand something of the actual operations of war. They were not disappointed. The casualties were not excessive, but the spectacle of the bloodshed and desolation of war was new and unfamiliar. The fields of Magenta and Solferino were strewn with dead and wounded; the diseases incident to the movements and operations of large armies abounded; the surgical and hospital staffs were inadequate in point of numbers and equipment, and were otherwise badly supplied and obviously unequal to the task of caring for the enormous numbers of sick and wounded who were thrown into their hands for medical and surgical treatment. Anesthetics had not yet found a place in the official medical supply tables; antiseptics and antiseptic surgery were still to be invented and perfected; and the charitably disposed found abundant opportunity to assist the medical and hospital staffs in relieving the sick and caring for the wounded.

Two philanthropic citizens of Switzerland-Gustave Moynier and Henri Dunant, both men of high executive ability and widely experienced in relief work, were among the first to arrive in the field, and instantly addressed themselves to the task of organizing and coördinating the well disposed but unskilled activities of those who were willing to assist in caring for the sick and wounded; and it was out of the experience gained by these two philanthropic workers that the first Geneva conference came into being.

The Geneva conference of 1864 thus marks, in a sense, the revival or renewal of military activity on a large scale, to which the people of western Europe and the new countries beyond the sea had not been accustomed since the first Napoleon had been eliminated as a factor in European politics. It was also the direct outgrowth of the short but sanguinary war, waged in behalf of Italian unity which, in the language of the French emperor, was to free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. But the object lessons in human suffering were not alone sufficient to fix public attention upon the need of concerted action, for to these were added four years of agitation and awakening of public opinion before the matter was taken up by the federal council of Switzerland and the call for an international conference was accepted by the powers.

It is an error to suppose that the work of the first Geneva conference was in any sense a discovery. The convention of 1864 may be said to have fairly represented the best existing practice among continental armies in respect to the management and control of the sick and wounded, and in the immunities which were habitually accorded to the personnel of the medical and sanitary services who were charged with their care and treatment. That convention embodied, in the form of an international agreement, the practice which had theretofore rested upon customs and usage, and derived its obligatory force from the implied consent of the states which accepted and applied them in the conduct of their military operations. To accomplish this, the framers of the old convention attempted to apply the principle of neutrality to the sick and wounded, and to the personnel and matériel of the sanitary establishments which habitually accompanied the operations of armies in the field.

In the march of improvements in medicine and surgery, the interval which separates the Italian campaign of 1859 and the Manchurian