league of workingmen declared for strict neutrality. From the year 1870 Mr. Cremer became identified with the cause of peace and arbitration, and the balance of his long and useful life was devoted to the cause. Mr. Cremer noticed that the friends of peace had held meetings, that they had promoted petitions to Parliament, but that little or nothing definite resulted from them. He believed that Great Britain and the United States were the two nations most likely to take the initiative in international arbitration, and he therefore set about doing two thingsfirst, to organize labor for the cause of arbitration, and to bring the influence of labor to bear upon Great Britain and the United States, in which the Governments respond most readily to public opinion.

The league of workingmen was therefore transferred into the International Arbitration League. The new league was in close touch with the labor organizations, and indeed was in no uncertain measure the mouthpiece of enlightened and organized labor, but it differed from the older league of workingmen in that the purpose of the league was not merely to safeguard the interests of workingmen in general, but more particularly by international arbitration. The first few years of Mr. Cremer's activity were devoted to the extension of the league's influence, at home and abroad. In 1875 the league began work in Paris, and, during the ensuing twenty-five years exercised a great influence in favor of arbitration, especially in 1900, when war threatened to break out between France and Great Britain over the Fashoda incident. Again, in 1878, as in the sixties and in 1870, Mr. Cremer's league, by public demonstrations, took firm ground against the clamor for war against Russia on behalf of the Turk.

Having thus organized an international arbitration league and converted labor to arbitration, Mr. Cremer felt his presence in the House of Commons would increase the influence of the cause to which his life was devoted. That his ambition was not personal but was merged in the cause of arbitration is evidenced by the fact that in his contest at Warwick in 1868 as a radical member for Parliament he advocated international arbitration in his address to the electors as a more humane and economical method than war, and again in 1874 he appealed to the electorate on the platform of international arbitration. Defeated on each occasion, he was returned to Parliament in 1885.

As a member of Parliament he enjoyed an influence which he did not possess as a private citizen, and within two years after his election Mr. Cremer proceeded to carry out his program. He felt that the United

States should take the initiative in the matter of arbitration and that a proposal made by the United States to Great Britain would be accepted. He circulated a petition among members of Parliament to that effect, and although he did not expect to get more than fifty signatures he obtained two hundred and thirty-four, including the well-known names of John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain. Accompanied by twelve members of Parliament Mr. Cremer took the memorial to Washington, where he was received by President Cleveland and had the satisfaction of reading the memorial to the President and Congress. The visit of Mr. Cremer and his friends was unofficial, but it enlisted the sympathy of the American Government. In 1888 the late John Sherman reported to the Senate a concurrent resolution requesting the President:

To invite, from time to time, as fit occasions may arise, negotiations with any government with which the United States has or may have diplomatic relations, to the end that any differences or disputes arising between the two Governments which can not be adjusted by diplomatic agency, may be referred to arbitration, and be peaceably adjusted by such means.

This resolution was adopted by the Senate February 14, 1890, and the House of Representatives April 3, 1890. The United States therefore was prepared to enter into a treaty of arbitration. Mr. Cremer thereupon sought with renewed effort to influence Great Britain to conclude an arbitration treaty with the United States, and in 1893 his resolution in favor of an Anglo-American treaty of arbitration, seconded by Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), warmly supported by Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt, was unanimously carried. Mr. Cremer thereupon prepared another memorial to the President and Congress of the United States, which was signed by three hundred and fifty-four members Parliament. This Mr. Cremer took to Washington and presented to Mr. Cleveland, and the memorial was publicly read in Congress and placed upon its records. The result of Mr. Cremer's enthusiasm was the Olney: Pauncefote treaty of arbitration between Great Britain and the United States, which unfortunately failed of ratification in the Senate by three votes in 1897. The defeat of the treaty was from every point of view & public, indeed an international, misfortune, because it was and is the model treaty of international arbitration, and the acceptance of such a treaty by Great Britain and the United States would have incalculably advanced the cause of arbitration. The present treaties, with their reserves of independence, vital interests, and honor, are not to be classed with this international agreement, which excluded only from arbitration questions of independence and provided a permanent court between

two countries in which international controversies might be adjusted by judicial means. The Hague Conferences, however, and the impetus given by them to arbitration, will no doubt recover the lost ground, but vital interests and so-called questions of honor are likely to figure in international agreements for years to come.

Mr. Cremer had had great experience with the workingmen and the public generally, and while able to convince them of the wisdom of arbitration and peaceful settlement of international difficulties he found that the intelligent and enlightened members of parliamentary bodies were difficult to reach and persuade. To settle a difficulty it is necessary to understand it, and a dispute is unlikely to assume serious consequences between people who understand and respect each other's motives. Mr. Cremer therefore felt that good understanding between foreign nations would be best promoted by an interchange of thought and views between various members of the parliamentary bodies, and that agreements reached by them in informal and unofficial reunions would be likely to succeed in the various parliaments if accepted in advance by members pledged to secure their enactment. Therefore, in 1888 Mr. Cremer hit upon the plan of an interparliamentary union, which met for the first time at Paris in 1888, with thirty-four members in attendance. This was a preliminary meeting. In 1889 the organization was launched and held its first formal meeting at Paris on the anniversary of the French Revolution, whose watchword was the watchword of progress, liberty, equality, fraternity. Ninety-nine French and British members attended, and the distinguished French statesman Jules Simon presided. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the union and its work, for it has brought together the legislators of constitutional countries pledged in advance to cooperate in the cause of peace and progress. It should not be forgotten that at the session of 1894 the Interparliamentary Union proposed a plan for a permanent court of arbitration not unlike that. adopted by the First Hague Conference, and that at the session of 1895 M. Descamps, as president of the union, was authorized to issue his famous Mémoir to the powers in favor of international arbitration, which was at once a program and a manifestation; nor should it be overlooked that the Interparliamentary Union drafted the plan of compulsory arbitration which secured the approbation of the overwhelming majority of the countries represented at the recent Hague Conference, and it should be stated that the Second Hague Conference owed its existence to the resolution adopted by the Interparliamentary Union at St. Louis in 1904. From a small group of thirty-four members, representing two

nations, the Interparliamentary Union has grown into a large assembly of well-nigh a thousand, and its annual meetings are international events. Mr. Cremer's services to peace were therefore great, and the Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 1903, was a fitting international recognition of his services, as was the knighthood conferred upon him in 1907 by the present enlightened sovereign of Great Britain. Mr. Cremer believed that arbitration, like virtue, was its own reward. It was with him a question of faith. Sprung from the working classes, pinched by poverty, his soul was untouched by ambition or a desire for wealth. He accepted the knighthood upon its second offer because it seemed to him a tribute to labor, just as Lord Macaulay considered the peerage as a homage to literature, and it is characteristic of the man that he touched not a penny of the Nobel Prize, amounting to $40,000, but handed it over as an endowment for the International Arbitration League, which he had organized, whose secretary he had been for many years, and which was the means by which he accomplished much that was noble and worthy for his fellowman. A philanthropist from boyhood, his life was mercifully extended to four score years, so that he might see the fruit of his good works and rejoice at their success.

THE WHEWELL PROFESSORSHIP OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Readers of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW will be pleased to learn that Dr. Oppenheim, the author of the very interesting and valuable paper on "The Science of International Law: Its Task and Method," which appeared in the April number of the JOURNAL for the current year, was, on the 31st day of July, elected Whewell professor of international law at the University of Cambridge. The professorship is in itself a great honor. It was founded in the sixties by Dr. William Whewell, master of Trinity College, with the express injunction that the occupant of the chair should, to quote the language of Sir Henry Maine, "make it his aim, in all parts of his treatment of the subject, to lay down such rules and suggest such measures as might tend to diminish the evils of war and finally to extinguish war among nations."

The occupants of the chair have been men eminently worthy of the trust. The first professor, elected in 1869, was the late Sir William Harcourt, known by the admirable letters of Historicus, in the London Times, on some questions of international law arising out of the American civil war; and in the politics of Great Britain known as the faithful and earnest follower of Mr. Gladstone, whether as Solicitor-General,

Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, or leader of the House of Commons. The second incumbent was a man no less distinguished, namely, Sir Henry Maine, whose works on ancient law, early law and custom, and early history of institutions and village communities have given him high rank among the historical school of jurisprudence, and whose lectures on international law, delivered as Whewell professor, caused a profound regret that his life might not have been spared for the science of Grotius. Dr. Oppenheim's immediate predecessor was Frof. John Westlake, a recognized authority on international law, one of the founders of the Revue de Droit International et de Législation Comparée, a member of the Institute of International Law since its foundation in 1873, and its past president. His recent work on International Law in two small volumes, published by the Cambridge University Press, is the result of a lifetime of study, and will always rank as a thoughtful and valuable contribution to the science.

To say that Dr. Oppenheim is worthy of his predecessors is in itself great praise, but it is the simple fact, recognized by Professor Westlake himself, whose choice Dr. Oppenheim was. Born in Germany in 1858, Dr. Oppenheim is barely fifty years of age, and we may hope that he still has a long and distinguished career before him. For years he was professor of criminal law on the Continent at Freiburg, in Baden, and Basle, in Switzerland. From the year 1885 to 1895 he devoted himself chiefly to jurisprudence as governing criminal law in a series of works published in Germany and highly respected by German scholars. From 1895 to the present day he has devoted himself solely to international law, and for the past few years was lecturer in public international law at the London School of Economics and Political Science of the University of London. His most important publications in the field of international law are the Treatise (Volume I, Peace, 1905; Volume II, War, 1906), published by Longmans Green & Co., and "The Science of International Law: Its Task and Method," which the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW had the honor to publish in its April number. It is not too much to say that Dr. Oppenheim's Treatise is fully abreast of the most exacting scholarship of Germany, that it is profoundly scientific, that it is broad and generous in its conception and execution and wonderfully free from national prejudices, which so often and so curiously mar treatises on international law.

It is not too much to say that the University of Cambridge and Dr. Oppenheim are equally honored and fortunate in the choice of the Whewell professor.