to good use, is well aware of the value of arbitration, but, on the
other hand, it knows also how to prize the purely legal decision of
legal questions. It has actually happened that a state has not ventured
to submit a certain dispute to arbitration because it feared that its
claim would not receive jural treatment in this way. It is just because
the existence of an international court would promote the non-warlike
settlement of international claims that its erection has been put
forward. The reason is that even with the most careful selection of
arbiters, one is never certain beforehand as to the quarter whence they
will derive their ideas of the _aequum et bonum_, whilst with a jural
settlement of claims the decision rests on the sure basis of law.
Further, the erection of an international court is not intended to cause
the suppression of the so-called Permanent Court of Arbitration; on the
contrary, the machinery of this latter is to be retained in full
existence, so that the parties may in every case be able to choose
between the Court of Arbitration and a real court. The future will show
that both can render good service side by side.

[Sidenote: Composition of an international court.]

61. If the erection of an international court comes to pass, the
equipment of it with competent and worthy men will be of the highest
importance. Their selection will have difficulties of all sorts to
overcome. The peculiar character of international law, the conflict
between the positive school and the school which would derive
international law from natural law, the diversity of peoples (consequent
on diversity of speech and of outlook on law and life) and of legal
systems and of constitutional conceptions, and the like--all these bring
the danger that the court in question should become the arena of
national jealousies, of empty talk, and of political collisions of
interest, instead of being the citadel of international justice. All
depends on the spirit in which the different governments make the choice
of judges. Let regard be paid to a good acquaintance with international
law joined to independence, judicial aptitude, and steadfastness of
character. Let what is expected of candidates be the representation not
of political interests but of the interests of international
jurisprudence. Let nomination be made not of such diplomatists as are
conversant with the law of nations, but of jurists who, while conversant
with this b