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I make no apology for asking your attention at this time to a subject outside the general current of your study and probable practice.

This institution among the earliest gave attention to the study of International Law. One of its greatest Presidents has contributed profoundly to that study. You have recently in your law publication been giving abundant space to the law of nations. Your distinguished Dean made a notable contribution to the discussion of a World's Court. And now the presence in your faculty of the distinguished jurist and statesman whose proposal of general arbitration has signally advanced that cause, justifies again the absence of apology.

It is now a hundred and sixteen years since the first arbitration between Great Britain and the United States. In his closing argument the agent of the United States, James Sullivan, used these words:

"Why shall not all the nations on earth determine their disputes in this mode rather than choke the rivers with their carcasses and stain the soil of continents with their slain?"

That arbitration concerned the eastern boundary between the United States and New Brunswick, the St. Croix River boundary. It had been said by Mr. Hamilton that,

"Territorial disputes have at all times been found one of the most fertile sources of hostility among the nations. Perhaps the

* Address delivered before the graduating class of the Yale Law School, June, 1913.

greatest portion of the wars that have desolated the earth have sprung from this origin."

Certainly the progress of the world is sharply marked by the change of view in this particular. No one now really contends that the question of boundary may not be dealt with by arbitration, or that the honor of nations is so bound up in invisible lines that there can be no demarcation except in blood.

These words of Mr. Sullivan were far from being the earliest expression of the aspiration toward peace. It was current in the thought of the day. Only two years before, Kant had descended from the realms of pure logic and abstract philosophy to propose the Federation of Free States.

Bentham less than a decade before had set forth his proposal for a general Diet of Nations to which each of the Great Powers was to send two deputies, and whose decrees were to be enforced by placing a recalcitrant power under the ban of Europe. Early in the same century Abbe St. Pierre, far in advance of his time, had proposed a General League of Christendom, by which war might be abolished and the dignity and honor of states upheld by peaceful means.

The time was not ripe. The centuries' old custom of conflict was not lightly or swiftly to be put aside. The white agony of the Napoleonic wars was overspreading the land Two decades of devastation awaited Europe. Well might it then have been said—and no doubt was said that St. Pierre and Kant and Bentham were mere dreamers, and that Peace was an inaccessible Utopia.

Now, after a century of education, after the foundation of thousands of peace societies, after councils and conferences and conventions without number, again;

"The earth is full of anger;

The seas are dark with wrath,
The nations in their harness
Go up against our path."

The titanic struggle between Russia and Japan is scarcely over when Italy crosses the Mediterranean to Tripoli; the Balkan States rise against Turkey, and China in rebellion overthrows the Manchus. The sneer is easy that the Peace Movement is a failure, that law will never be substituted for war, and that the true advocate of peace is one who is willing to fight for it.

Of course, it is true that war has not ceased from the earth, and it may well be conceded that M. Leon Bourgeois at the last Peace Conference at The Hague was right when he said, "There is a vast number of political questions which the condition of the world does not yet permit to be submitted universally and compulsorily to arbitration."

President Eliot has recently pointed out the causes that still make for war. Devoted as we may be to the cause of peace, and recognizing as the world does the hideousness of war, we cannot regret the uprising in China or in the Balkans. The determination of such struggles is not within the present day accord of nations, or within the province of law and arbitration. But they do not retard the progress of that accord or the establishment of respect for law in the broad and swiftly widening field which they occupy.

Even our boasted common law does not in every event secure us against appeals to force. England is not free from it in a struggle for suffrage. Labor contests are not free from it even under the shadow of the court house. Our law recognizes that its processes in riot, violence and insurrection may be suspended by executive action and that it cannot inquire whether the condition exists on which the suspension is based. Constitutions secure the public safety by this delegation of autocratic power. "Public danger warrants the substitution of executive process for judicial process." (Moyer v. Peabody, 212 U. S., 78, in re Moyer, 35 Colorado, 159.

We need not stop with this reply. We may well consider what the century has brought forth. Just now we are preparing to celebrate a hundred years of peace between two great peoples who had twice previously been at war in a third of that time. We are thus brought face to face with the fact that for a century the English-speaking nations have been at peace between themselves. They have not been peaceful because decadent, but have overspread the earth and covered the seas with their commerce. Rivalries and far-flung lines of contact, however, have not embroiled them. For well nigh half a century the nations of Western Europe too have been at peace ments, they have not drawn the sword.

Burdened bmy armaThe peace of the Atlan

tic has been preserved. Ships of war which would have sunk Armadas in an hour sweep over it, but they have not destroyed each other.

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