famous America's "fiat-is-law" sentence (see page 109 above) and Knox's "comprehending view" was probably that which he enunciated in this sentence:

The spirit behind these words contemplated, I am sure, no arbitrary exercise of sheer power, but a determined zeal in magnanimous consideration for the rights of other American Republics, a sincere sympathy with them in their trials, an insistence upon the right, that good might come to them, and that our own vital interests should not be menaced.1

Finally, after these criticisms have all been given full weight, the point to which one comes round is that diplomatic proceedings must be considered in the light of their results rather than by comparison with procedures which critics like to imagine as having been available alternatives. A more gentle diplomacy might have arranged the Guiana boundary in the course of time; but that it could have disposed of the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute about it so promptly, or before serious complications arose, is, after all, supposition. It could hardly have succeeded better in convincing Europe that the United States had a foreign policy which she was willing to insist upon. It could hardly have fixed the Monroe Doctrine so firmly in the consciousness of the American public. But for Olney, John Hay could not have asserted so simply that his foreign policy rested on the Ten Commandments and the Monroe Doctrine. Olney and Cleveland did much more than dispose of a discussion over a bit of tropical wilderness. They gave

1 Report of New York State Bar Association (1912), 307. See also John W. Foster's remarks about criticisms on the language of Olney's dispatch in A Century of American Diplomacy, 470.

the United States a new standing in the eyes of other nations. To estimate their achievement by reckoning the value of a bit of territory in South America, or by saying "it was only a boundary dispute between strangers," is to ignore the fundamental purpose of their diplomacy and to miss the fruits of its boldness and tenacity.

XII

THE GENERAL ARBITRATION TREATY

OTHING has been said about the general arbitra

NOTH

tion treaty with Great Britain, which was negotiated in 1896 and rejected by the Senate; but it grew out of the Venezuelan negotiation in a certain sense, and went along with that negotiation.

Pacific settlement of international disputes may be effected by negotiation, mediation, or arbitration. The first two are essentially diplomatic methods, while arbitration is genuinely judicial. In 1895 the movement to provide for the use of this method in advance of particular disputesthat is, in favor of "general" arbitration treaties — had reached this stage: Treaty projects had already been endorsed in more or less definite form by several international congresses, notably the Pan-American Congress of 1889-90, and had more recently been recommended to their Governments by the Congress of the United States, the House of Commons, and the French Chamber. Cleveland had spoken of them as desirable in his inaugural address. But except for certain agreements between South American states, no general arbitration treaties had been adopted or even negotiated.

When the Venezuelan affair threatened to halt in the spring of 1896, Lord Salisbury instructed Pauncefote to take up a project for such a treaty with the State Department. Undoubtedly he hoped to find a way of dispos

ing of the Venezuela dispute by sweeping it into a larger scheme. He was also taking advantage of the public sentiment in favor of general arbitration which that dispute had aroused. Olney, speaking for the Cleveland Administration, responded cordially, but insisted that the Venezuela case and the project of a general arbitration treaty must be kept apart.1

The two Governments approached general arbitration with a common purpose, but with different views of the expediencies. Lord Salisbury was cautious. "A system of arbitration," said he, "is an entirely novel arrangement, and, therefore, the conditions under which it should be adopted are not likely to be ascertained antecedently.. it would be wise to commence with a modest beginning, and not to hazard the success of the principle by adventuring it upon doubtful ground." Accordingly he proposed a treaty which was general and obligatory for limited categories of dispute, but which did not contemplate "universal" arbitration between the two countries, and he required that a court of six judges, three named by each country, should come within one of unanimity in order to render a decision on the more serious categories of question. Thus no award could be made against a state without the assent of a majority of its own representatives on the court. (If this limitation had governed the tribunal of six jurists who decided the Alaskan boundary question in 1903, their award would have left that dispute open.)

Olney conceived a different method of approach. To his

1 See Cleveland's message of December 4, 1893; Richardson, 1x, 442; Moore's International Law Digest, VII, 70-78; Foreign Relations (1896), 222, 224.