to him patriotism is
but an extended self-interest. We love our country because our own
interests and our country's interests are one. Unable to view
international affairs apart from national interests, we are
handicapped in making those balanced judgments necessary to judicial
arbitration. An act reprehensible under the Union Jack becomes
patriotic under the Stars and Stripes. At both Hague Conferences all
the powers were seemingly in favor of curtailing expenditures for
armaments. The unprecedented increase in expenditures which followed
bespeaks their sincerity, or, rather, bespeaks each nation's mistrust
of the sincerity of others. A number of years ago the Farmers'
Alliance, organized in some of the Southern tobacco states, voted to
reduce the acreage of tobacco for a given year in order to raise the
price. So many members tried to profit by this opportunity to realize
a high price for a big crop that there was a greater acreage planted
that year than ever before. Can we expect better of groups than of the
individuals of which the groups are composed? Most nations question
the justice of Russia's policy leading up to the war with Japan,
England's course in South Africa, and America's attitude toward the
Philippines; yet the body of citizens of each of these three
countries, while concurring in the general opinion concerning the
other two, justifies its own government's actions with patriotic
pride.

The chief respect in which this bias interferes with the progress of
international arbitration is in restricting the scope of general
arbitration treaties, the average formula of such treaties excluding
all questions which involve "national honor and vital interests." A
greatly modified survival of the spirit which in primitive peoples
regarded the tribe over the mountain or across the stream as a fit
object of hatred and fear, the objection to a judicial settlement of
such questions assumes that a nation's honor and vital interests are
goods peculiar in that they may be inconsistent with justice. The
attitude of the United States toward the recently proposed treaty
between England and America may be taken as typical of the attitude
which prevails on this subject generally. The formulators of the
treaty took an advanced step in that, instead of reserving questions
of national honor and vital interests, they provided for the
arbitration of all differences which are "justiciable in their nature
by reason of being suscep