should not be less than the salaries received by the justices of the supreme court of the United States or of the supreme court of New York. The salary of the chief justice of the supreme court of the United States is $13,500 per annum and that of the associate judges, $12,500 per annum. The justices of the court of appeals of New York receive as follows: Chief justice $10,500 per annum, and associate judges, $10,000 per annum, with allowance of $2000 apiece for expenses. We suggest, therefore, that a proper salary for the judges of the permanent court of international arbitration at the Hague would be $15,000 per annum. To this might be added $2500 or $5000 for clerks and incidental expenses, or say $20,000 for each judge. With a staff of fifteen judges the total expenses of the personnel of the court would be (say) $300,000 per annum. An expense which would, however, be an expense of only $20,000 per annum for each signatory power appointing a judge.

Through the princely gift in 1903 of $1,500,000 by Andrew Carnegie, a private citizen of the United States, for the establishment and maintenance of a proper court house and library for the Hague tribunal the nations of the world are relieved from that increment of expense, and only the salaries of the judges and clerks need be provided. The world's highest court so constituted, would then cost the United States of America the small sum of $20,000 per annum.

We now pay the United States ministers to each of the great powers, such as Germany, Great Britain, etc., a salary of $17,500 per annum, and surely the United States of America and each of the other great nations of the world could find no excuse for failing to contribute this comparatively nominal amount to the maintenance of this imposing

court.

In the fiscal year of 1905 the powers spent on their armies, as follows: Russia, $185,000,000; Germany, $157,000,000; Great Britain, $153,000,000; France, $133,000,000; United States; $112,000,000; India, $98,000,000; Austria, $84,000,000; Italy, $55,000,000; and Japan, $21,000,000.

In 1906 the United States expended on its army and on its war department, $93,659,462. On its navy department, $110,956,107. On the twenty-eighth day of February, 1907, Lord Tweedmouth, the first lord of the admiralty in reporting to parliament gave the

naval estimate for the British navy for 1907 as $40,500,000, for new construction as against $46,175,000, for 1906.

With such enormous sums annually spent and under existing circumstances properly spent, by the nations of the world in maintaining their armaments, surely no nation could object on the score of economy to contribute its pittance of $20,000 a year to the good work of establishing and maintaining a permanent court of international arbitration and thereby advancing the cause and prospects of international arbitration as a substitute for public war.

Hence the objection to this plan that it would be a costly experiment is too trivial to be entertained for a moment. A single decision in the first case referred to the tribunal avoiding the war that might otherwise have arisen would save enough money as compared with the cost of that war to run the court for many years. For instance: take the arbitration at the Hague over the question whether the claimed preference of the blockading creditor nations of Venezuela over the pacific creditor nations in the payment out of the customs receipts of that country, was proper under the circumstances. Had that question been submitted to the arbitrament of a general European war, the cost would have been incalculable; not to mention the crime against civilization which would have been thus perpetrated.

As we maintain a great navy in idleness and rightly do not count the cost in view of its priceless value at the crucial moment, so should we maintain, if necessary, a great international court in idleness, if you please, so that it shall be ready for action at the crucial moment and thus prevent the war that might otherwise arise. The cost is therefore a negligible quantity. It would be expensive, but war is so much more expensive that the two are not to be mentioned in one breath. As well weigh a mote against the moon.

Again, the advantage of having a court fully organized prepared and ready to do business, and which, in the course of time, through its wise decisions, would obtain a hold upon the imaginations of men-not possible in the case of a fleeting, evanescent tribunal, would be an inestimable advantage.

Men are so prone to take the line of least resistance.

Again, such a permanent court would soon begin to develop an international law of precedents whose value, as a mode of settling

disputes without recourse either to war or arbitration, would be priceless.

And as in the case of municipal law when the court makes a wrong departure-wrong in the eyes of the legislature—a statute remedies the defect; so if decisions were made offensive to the sense of justice-or interests of the great nations—a council of the great nations could change it by resolution; or any particular nation may refuse to arbitrate before the court except pursuant to a protocol eliminating the objectionable ruling.

Thus and thus only will be obtained the nearest approach to human perfection in the establishment and maintenance of a system of international arbitration.

Pending the realization of this great end, public opinion should be educated to stigmatize as a crime the appointment on an international arbitration of any but the most highly trained experts-men fitted in every sense duly to discharge the important duties of their high officemen of sound sense and well balanced minds-men, in a word, of the true judicial temperament.

A PROSPECT

As perjury was the drawback to trial by jury which rendered possible the survival of private war and its daughter, trial by battle, far into the Middle Ages, and up to a time whose civilization was otherwise unfitted for its continuance, so unfit men as arbitrators and the evanescent character of the courts so constituted are the drawbacks which are now weighing heavily against international arbitration in its struggle for existence against public war.

All lovers of peace and humanity who desire that in this struggle between two institutions the system of international arbitration shall ultimately survive, must lend their energies to the establishment of that system upon the best possible foundations in order that it shall become the fittest to survive in the environment.

The Hague tribunal is a great advance. But, as shown, it is defective as now constituted. It needs to be reorganized and made a permanent tribunal in the manner suggested.

Let us then have a permanent court at the Hague and always open for business, composed of a limited number of judges with fixed tenure of office during good behavior and fixed salaries, residing at the Hague.

Let private claims be submitted to this tribunal as a matter of course on the suggestion of the chancelleries of the nations interested. What divinity doth hedge about a king? Why should not sovereignties answer at such times and places for their alleged misdeeds?

Let this court be ready at all times for the hearing and decision of great public questions when and as submitted by the sovereignties involved in them.

So will be constituted a true permanent court of] international arbitration, a true international judiciary from which will spring a true system of international law.

R. FLOYD CLARKE.

THE GENEVA CONVENTION OF 1906

The members of the congress of Vienna who, for the most part, directed the international politics of Europe for the first half of the nineteenth century, have never been accounted as exponents of liberal thought, or as the advocates of liberal policies. But it must be said in behalf of their narrow and, at times, reactionary statesmanship, that it kept the peace in western Europe during the period intervening between the battle of Waterloo, which terminated the military and political activity of the first Napoleon, and the appearance of his nephew in the rôle of a military commander in the Italian campaign of 1859. For the first time in recorded history it was given to the harassed inhabitants of the Rhine provinces to see a full half century of peace, and to enjoy so much as fifty years of fortunate and uninterrupted immunity from the hardships and sacrifices of war.

The operations in the Crimea, which abounded in inefficiency and mismanagement, had been carried on in a distant and inaccessible region, but the theater of the campaign of 1859 was in northern Italy, an area so accessible from all parts of western Europe that it instantly filled with curious observers, who desired to see at first hand something of the actual operations of war. They were not disappointed. The casualties were not excessive, but the spectacle of the bloodshed and desolation of war was new and unfamiliar. The fields of Magenta and Solferino were strewn with dead and wounded; the diseases incident to the movements and operations of large armies abounded; the surgical and hospital staffs were inadequate in point of numbers and equipment, and were otherwise badly supplied and obviously unequal to the task of caring for the enormous numbers of sick and wounded who were thrown into their hands for medical and surgical treatment. Anesthetics had not yet found a place in the official medical supply tables; antiseptics and antiseptic surgery were still to be invented and perfected; and the charitably disposed found abundant opportunity to assist the medical and hospital staffs in relieving the sick and caring for the wounded.