, that we could
not, wisely and safely, submit to in the future ourselves. [Applause.]

While, then, there was a preliminary question of gravest importance to
be determined in this arbitration--this peaceful substitute for
war--"the terrible litigation of States"--no less than this, how widely
and how heavily we should press the question of accountability against a
neutral, and how far the question should be pressed, in the future,
against us, I must congratulate the country for having received, at the
outset of the deliberations at Geneva, a determination from the
Tribunal, upon the general principles of public law, that when peaceful
adjustments in redress of wrongs are attempted between friendly States,
no measure of indemnity can be claimed which at all savors of the
exactions made only by a victorious over a beaten foe. [Applause.]

And when we come to the final award of this High Tribunal, I think the
country may be congratulated, and the world may be congratulated, that
while we have secured a judgment of able and impartial publicists in
favor of the propositions of international law on which we had
insisted, and have received amends by its judgment for the wrongs we had
suffered from Great Britain, we have also secured great principles in
favor of neutrality in the future, making it easier, instead of harder,
for nations to repress the sympathies, the passions and the enlistments
of their people, and to keep, during the pendency of war, the action of
a neutral State within and subject to the dictates of duty and of law.
For we have there established that the duty of a neutral government to
preserve its subjects from interference with belligerent rights is in
proportion to the magnitude of the evils that will be suffered by the
nation against whom, and at whose cost, the infraction of neutrality is
provoked. We have made it apparent, also, that a powerful nation, in the
advanced civilization of our age, cannot escape from an accountability
upon the rough calculation, upon which so much reliance has doubtless
been placed in the past, upon the unwillingness of the offended and
injured nation, in the correction of its wrongs, to rush into the costs
and sacrifices of war. And we have made it apparent to the proudest
power in the world (and there is none prouder than our own nation,) that
there must be a peaceful accounting for errors and wrongs, in which
justice shall be done without the effusion of blood. [Prolonged