INTRODUCTION cli 



But in a larger sense, the award must be very gratifying to partisans 

 of arbitration in all parts of the world, because an historic controversy, 

 coincident with the independence of the United States, and which at 

 times seemed not unlikely to result in war, was decided by a tribunal 

 at a single session of little more than three months, and the question 

 removed from the field of controversy. Small questions, it is said, are 

 only submitted to arbitration; and it is well that important cases, such 

 as the Alabama claims and the North Atlantic Fisheries dispute, in- 

 volving delicate and intricate questions of alleged national honor in the 

 former, questions of internal and external sovereignty in the latter, be 

 pointed to in order to make it appear, even to the unwilling, that there 

 is no limit to the scope of arbitration if only nations wish to settle their 

 controversies by an appeal to reason rather than by an appeal to the 

 sword. May the example of Great Britain and the United States be 

 one of many precedents in the gradual substitution of law for force. 



James Brown Scott 



