pressure we can bring to bear upon her in China or
elsewhere is moral pressure. Through what was considered by some a
grave strategical error, the naval treaty was completed before any
settlement of the Chinese and Siberian questions had been reached.

The French insistence on the practically unlimited right to build
submarines caused much hard feeling in England. The British delegates
had proposed the total abolition of submarines, and this proposal had
been ably supported by the arguments of Mr. Balfour and Lord Lee.
Unfortunately the United States delegation stood for the submarine,
proposing merely certain limits upon its use. The five naval powers
finally signed a treaty reaffirming the old rules of international law
in regard to the search and seizure of merchant vessels, and declaring
that "any person in the service of any Power who shall violate any of
those rules, whether or not such person is under orders of a
governmental superior, shall be deemed to have violated the laws of war
and shall be liable to trial and punishment as if for an act of piracy
and may be brought to trial before the civil or military authorities of
any Power within the jurisdiction of which he may be found." By the
same treaty the signatory powers solemnly bound themselves to prohibit
the use in war of poisonous gases.

The attempt to limit by treaty the use of the submarine and to prohibit
altogether the use of gases appears to many to be utterly futile.
After the experience of the late war, no nation would readily trust the
good faith of another in these matters. Each party to a war would
probably feel justified in being prepared to use the submarine and
poison gases, contrary to law, in case the other party should do so.
We would thus have the same old dispute as in the late war in regard to
floating mines as to which party first resorted to the outlawed
practice. What is the use in solemnly declaring that a submarine shall
not attack a merchant vessel, and that the commander of a submarine who
violates this law shall be treated as a pirate, when the contracting
parties found it utterly impossible to agree among themselves upon a
definition of a merchant vessel?

But the reader may ask, what is the use in signing any treaty if
nations are so devoid of good faith? The answer is that the vast
majority of treaties are faithfully kept in time of peace, but that
very few treaties are fully observed in time of war. Had these five