in
truth, mean nothing but the mutual imputation of violence and outrage,
unhappily but too well demonstrated as justifiable motives for
apprehension, by reason of the ominous antecedents of an international
regime founded on the supremacy of power.

This precarious guaranty, the fruit of an unsteady and purely political
combination which may undergo the most unexpected alterations, cannot
assure a stable situation, because it is not in itself the constitution
of a common, strong, and commanding law; but, on the contrary, is the
distrust of the efficacy of the latter and a certain traditional disdain
for a humane and peaceful solution of international affairs.

When the anxiety of danger or an unforeseen obstacle does not prevent
recourse to arms, war breaks out if the motive is simply the securing of
an advantage sustained by a military power which the country chosen as
the object of aggression cannot forcibly check.

True it is that at the present time wars are less frequent and more
humane in the manner they are conducted than heretofore; but their
causes are ever the same, and the intervals between them are only due to
the increasing number of military powers, and to the fear of consequent
complications of political interests which it is hazardous to provoke.

Treaties of peace since the seventeenth century, which recorded the
birth of the modern law of nations, have on some occasions passed
through real transformation in obedience to the law of evolution of
human societies, which favor equilibrium, not as established by frail or
artificial alliances, nor by combinations of the powerful, but by its
ethnical factors and the amplitude of the national life based primarily
on the progress of its institutions, in the ever-increasing intervention
of the people in their own affairs and the reality and soundness of its
political and civil liberty.

The definite establishment of an international juridical organ,
sufficiently authorized and efficacious in its action, is yet a future
event. Law in this respect has not as yet gone beyond the limits of a
sphere that is at most one of pure speculation,--a worthy ideal, it is
true, but one which in actuality has only succeeded in modifying the
forms of violence by recording in the customary code of nations a few
rules to lessen the brutality of the action, without eliminating the
arbitrariness inherent in the sovereignty of arms.

In the work of common security and prosperi