(3) That all the nations thus far participating in the Court do so, without exception, explicitly in the terms of the Protocol, as Members of the League;

(4) That the Covenant of the League, embodying a wholly new system of international relations, is the fundamental law for this Court when the Council or Assembly seeks its opinion; and

(5) That the United States can have no part in the election of judges, unless its representatives sit for that purpose with the Council and the Assembly-that is, with the League.

It is therefore at least problematical if the Government of the United States can consistently participate in the so-called Permanent Court of International Justice, so long as it retains its present exclusive relations to the League and its Covenant.

THE RELATION OF THE COURT TO PEACE

So far as any plan to cooperate with other nations to achieve and preserve the peace of the world is concerned, it is clear that the League's Court has but slight relation to the peace of the world. The reasons for this are:

(1) That the Statute of the Court does not bind the governments to submit any case unless they choose to do so;

(2) That not even all the justiciable cases—that is, cases that can be settled by law-can be brought before the Court by the State whose rights are violated;

(3) That there is therefore no sure redress through the Court against the illegal conduct of a State that prefers to decide a dispute for itself by its superior force;

(4) That the condition of international law is at present so incomplete that it does not afford the necessary clear rules of action by which many important differences can be judicially adjudicated;

(5). That the League of Nations has rejected the American proposal, sustained by its own Committee of Jurists, for the revision and improvement of international law;

(6) That if strictly legal cases cannot be brought to trial by a nation that is wronged, there is little prospect that cases

where great national interests are involved which might lead to war will be submitted to the Court.

It may therefore be concluded that the pretension that the League's Court is in any way more of a law court than the Permanent Tribunal of Arbitration, in which the United States is a member, or that it offers any greater security of peace, is entirely illusory. To this must be added that the Covenant of the League, which is a fundamental law for the League's Court, in Article XX is accepted as "abrogating all obligations or understandings inter se which are inconsistent with the terms thereof"-thus substituting this compact for the rules of international law not in harmony with it, and making the Covenant the determining standard.

THE HAGUE CONFERENCES

The two conferences held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 were designed to remedy the uncertainty of international rules of action by the gradual embodiment of definite principles of the law of nations in formal treaties, which, after their ratification, would bind the ratifying governments to observe their provisions. Thus there was begun the formation of a corpus juris which in time might result in a system of voluntarily accepted rules of action in the light of which a government could know in advance what would be judged internationally legal, and a court could find a solid basis for declaring the law.

Unhappily, the temper of the war period caused the equable development of law and judicial adjudication to be disregarded, and the enforcement of peace by the combination of armed power was conceived of as a substitute for law and court decisions. There is in the Covenant of the League of Nations no provision for the improvement of international law and not even any clear mention of it as a binding rule. The recommendation of the Committee of Jurists that conferences be held for the clarification and extension of international law, to which reference has been made as originally an American proposal, was rejected by the Council and Assembly of the

League in legislating upon the Statute of the Court. It is impossible to escape the inference that, in place of the method of improving international law by the conference of jurists, it is intended that the Court shall be guided by the quasi legislation of the Council and the Assembly, which are merely political bodies. When it is asserted that such quasi legislation does not become effective unless the members of the League accept it, it requires to be recalled that, after all, the Council and the Assembly, as closed and exclusive bodies, are not competent to make international law, which is the business of the whole society of sovereign states.

A SUPERGOVERNMENT

At this point a fundamental principle of vast consequence comes into view: A court which judges without defined and accepted law, merely in accordance with its own sense of fitness or the decrees of a political body, is in its very nature a supergovernment, for it does not merely declare the law, which is the proper business of a court, but makes the law by its own unregulated action.

On the other hand, a court whith bases its decisions upon definite rules of action, voluntarily agreed upon or accepted by the litigants, has none of the qualities of a supergovernment. In adhering to such a court there is no surrender or transfer of a nation's sovereignty, which by its own acceptance of a rule of action has simply expressed the sovereign will to observe the law thus agreed upon.

The problem of enforcement is closely bound up with this distinction. To enforce upon a people a law that it has not accepted but which is merely the decree of an arbitrary body -especially a court composed almost exclusively of foreigners representing various forms of jurisprudence—would inevitably require a strong executive, and even armed force. But a judicial declaration of a clear law that has been voluntarily accepted and ratified by its own lawmaking body possesses a different character. The enforcement of such a law is an obligation undertaken by all parties in the voluntary estab