of an international court for
the peaceful settlement of all disputes between nations; the action of
the Senate of the United States in 1853, favoring a clause in all
future treaties with foreign countries whereby difficulties that could
not be settled by diplomacy should be referred to arbitrators; the
concurrence of the two Houses, twenty years later, in reaffirming this
principle; and at last their joint resolution, in 1888, requesting the
President to secure agreements to that end with all nations with whom
he maintained diplomatic intercourse.

But the American Commissioners at once made it clear that the rational
place for arbitration is as a substitute for war, not as a second
remedy, to which the contestant may still have a right to resort after
having exhausted the first. In the absence of the desired obligation to
arbitrate, the dissatisfied nation, according to the American theory,
may have, after diplomacy has completely failed, a choice of remedies,
but not a double remedy. It may choose arbitration, or it may choose
war; but the American Commissioners flatly refused to let it choose
war, and then, after defeat, claim still the right to call in
arbitrators and put again at risk before them the verdict of war.
Arbitration comes before war, they insisted, to avert its horrors; not
after war, to afford the defeated party a chance yet to escape its
consequences.

The principle thus stated is thought self-evidently sound and just.
Americans were surprised to find how completely it was overlooked in
the contemporaneous European discussion--how general was the sympathy
with the Spanish request for arbitration, and how naif the apparently
genuine surprise at the instant and unqualified refusal to consider it.
Even English voices joined in the chorus of encouraging approval that,
from every quarter in Europe, greeted the formal Spanish appeal for an
opportunity to try over in another forum the questions they had already
submitted to the arbitrament of arms. The more clearly the American
view is now recognized and accepted, the greater must be the tendency
in the future to seek arbitration at the outset. To refuse arbitration
when only sought at the end of war, and as a means of escaping its
consequences, is certainly to stimulate efforts for averting war at the
beginning of difficulties by means of arbitration. The refusal prevents
such degradation of a noble reform to an ignoble end as would make
arbitration the