nd
to indicate the points which especially need clearing up. It might also
be possible to consider the enactment, by convention, of an
international ordinance containing a series of rules for the
interpretation and construction of all international statutes. This
much is sure, that the interpretation of international statutes must be
freer than that of municipal statutes, and must therefore be directed
rather to the spirit of the law than to the meaning of the words used.
This is all the more requisite because French legal language is foreign
to most of the states concerned, and because it is not to be expected
that before ratification they should obtain minute information about the
meaning of every single foreign word employed.

CHAPTER III

INTERNATIONAL ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

[Sidenote: Law can exist without official administration.]

50. It is inherent in the nature of law that it should be put in
question whenever from time to time one party raises a claim in the name
of the law which the other resists in the name of the same law. If,
however, it be asserted that there cannot be any law where there is no
official administration of justice, this is a fallacy, and the fallacy
lies in considering the presence of the elements of the more perfect
situation to be presupposed in the less perfect situation. Beyond a
doubt it is the administration of law which gives law the certainty that
its authority will in every case obtain operative effect. But this
operative effect is obtainable even apart from administration, because
those who are subject to the law are in most cases clear as to its
contents, and so they raise no question about it, but submit to its
application without any need of recourse to jurisdictional officials.
All the same, when a dispute does arise, law needs official
administration: and, accordingly, in the long run, no highly developed
legal society can dispense with it.

[Sidenote: The Hague Court of Arbitration as a permanent institution.]

51. Until the end of the nineteenth century the society of states
possessed no organ which made international administration of justice
possible. When states had made up their mind to have a dispute between
them settled amicably, they either appointed the head of a foreign state
or a foreign international jurist as arbiter, or they selected a number
of persons to form an arbitral tribunal. It was a great step forward
when the first Hague Conferenc