Chapter 3: Are We our Brothers’ Keeper?

Opening Address as Chairman of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, May 18, 1910

No well-informed observer is likely to deny that the cause which this Conference is assembled to promote has made important progress during the past year. The several striking incidents which mark that progress—including, in particular, the identic circular note of Secretary Knox bearing date October 18, 1909, proposing the investment of the International Prize Court with the functions of a court of arbitral justice, and the hearty approval which the proposal has met; the public declaration of President Taft, made in New York on March 22, 1910, that there are no questions involving the honor or the interests of a civilized nation which it may not with propriety submit to judicial determination; the action of the Congress in making an appropriation for the Bureau of the Interparliamentary Union for the Promotion of International Arbitration, thus committing the United States Government officially to that admirable undertaking; and, finally, the forthcoming submission to the arbitral tribunal at The Hague of the century-old controversy between Great Britain and the United States as to the Newfoundland fisher- ies—all these are encouraging in high degree. To those who are impatient for the attainment of our ideal we can only say that progress toward it is steadily making and that the chief forces now at work in the world, political, economic, and ethical, are cooperating with us to bring about its attainment. To those who fear that we may make progress too fast and that some measure of national security will be sacrificed in pushing forward to establish international justice, we can only say that justice is itself the one real and continuing ground of security for both men and nations, and that heretofore in the history of mankind the devil has always been able to take care of his own cause without the necessary aid and comfort of the forces in the world that are aiming at the overthrow of the rule of any power but right.