The efforts made at the Hague Conference of 1907 to establish a Permanent Court of Arbitral Justice in addition to the panel which we call the Permanent Court of Arbitration, bore fruit at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 in Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The task of establishing a new court was too delicate for the Peace Conference to undertake. So the Covenant stopped short with directing the Council of the League of Nations to formulate plans for a Permanent Court of International Justice, and submit them to the members of the League “for adoption.” The Council lost no time after its organization in discharging this responsibility. At its second session, in February, 1920, which was really its first session for the transaction of business, it set up a Committee of Jurists to draft a scheme. This Committee deliberated through the summer of 1920, and its draft project was submitted to the Council at San Sebastian in August.

The International Conference of American States on Conciliation and Arbitration, which met in Washington from December 10, 1928, to January 5, 1929, was characterized by one of the delegates to the conference as the Locarno of the New World. Shortly after the signing of the General Pact for the Renunciation of War, we find the nations of the Western Hemisphere taking the logical next step of providing machinery for the pacific settlement of all international disputes. “ It is quite obvious that it is not sufficient to renounce war, unless we are ready to have recourse to the processes of peace.” Here is concrete evidence of the good faith of the American Republics to provide a clean-cut substitute for war as an instrument of national policy. The necessity for the development of machinery for international pacific settlement has been demonstrated to the present generation by the fact that the whole nature of the institution of war changed whenman became a scientist, an engineer, and a mechanic. Mass production, under the stimulus of intensive research, has madepossible the production of instruments of destruction which threaten to destroy civilization, unless international social relations can be brought within the control of law. While President-elect Hoover was making his good-will, personal-relations tour in South America, eminent jurists from twenty of the American Republics were meeting in Washington to set up the framework for the stabilization of international relations.

The law of unneutral service deals with those acts of neutral vessels which constitute assistance to a belligerent, significant enough in consequences to give the offender a hostile character. It must be emphasized that, contrary to the inferences of some writers, unneutral service has nothing to do with acts committed by a hostile state. There are rules dealing with such acts, but they are not comprehended within the meaning of the term which is the subject of this discussion.