1907.] 



TRIBUNAL OF ARBITRATION OF 1623. 309 



Emperor Nicholas the Second, and our own members, Ex-President 

 Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and the Baron d'Estournelles de Con- 

 stant. The latter, together with our late fellow countrymen, Fred- 

 erick W. Holls, a Pennsylvanian by birth, played an important part 

 at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 in securing the estab- 

 lishment of The Hague International Tribunal,^ and is to be one of 

 the chief delegates of France at the second Hague Peace Conference 

 next month. 



The past development of international arbitration gives prom- 

 ise for its future usefulness, although grave difficulties are certain 

 to arise in its application. Cases involving rather private than 

 national interests can be solved by arbitration. To this class of 

 cases belonged the Alabama Claims and the Bering Sea Seal Fish- 

 eries, and the Dogger Bank Incident. Those disputes were not of 

 such a nature that one of the disputants must give way in order that 

 the progress of the other should not be impeded, as was the case 

 in 1870 between France and Prussia. Neither were those cases lega- 

 cies growing out of bloody and bitter wars between the contestants. 

 In all three of those cases the litigants were anxious if possible to 

 avoid war, and a resort to Courts of Arbitration, in the first two 

 cases appointed ad hoc, in the latter to The Hague Tribunal, en- 

 abled them to avoid war honorably. These three cases are concrete 

 proof that international arbitration is possible in some cases. As 

 Mr. Thomas Balch of the Philadelphia Bar wrote in 1874 in " Inter- 

 national Courts of Arbitration " ^ apropos of the Alabama Claims : 

 " The friends of International Courts may fairly assert that this 

 mode of settling great national questions has been fully and success- 

 fully tried, that it may be considered as having thereby passed into 

 and henceforth forming a distinct part of that uncertain and shape- 

 less mass of decisions and dicta which we call International Law. 

 Without participating in the visions so grandly developed by Zuing- 

 lius, and so fondly cherished by Grotius, of the good time, a good 

 time to be won only by toil and unremitting effort — 



" Till the war-drums throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd 

 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." 

 ^ " The Peace Conference at the Hague," by Frederick W. Holls, New- 

 York, 1900. 



^ " International Courts of Arbitration," by Thomas Balch, 1874, reprinted 

 at Philadelphia, 1899, P- ^S- 



