Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, Vol. 226: July, 1917 October, 1917
Second: All other questions arising between the signatories and not settled by negotiation, shall be submitted to a council of conciliation for hearing, consideration, and recommendation.
Third: The signatory Powers shall jointly use forthwith both their economic and military forces against any one of their number that goes to war, or commits acts Of hostility against another Of the signatories before any question arising shall be submitted, as provided in the foregoing.' It will be noted that this programme carefully avoids the assertion Of any principles, such as those laid down by President Wilson, on which there is a fundamental difference of Opinion ab initio and it is for this reason that it has been so widely accepted. It represents, in fact, no very radical breach with the traditional procedure in international relations. The task of settling disputes between nations is still in the first instance to be left to diplomacy. The Obligation of submitting justiciable disputes to an arbitral tribunal is not carried beyond that which has already been defined in many treaties between the Powers. The suggested Council Of Conciliation is, in effect, but a device for bringing collective diplomacy to bear on questions in dispute, with a View to the avoidance Of war, as has happened often enough In the past, e. G. In the case of the Berlin Conference Of 1886 which demarcated the respective spheres of in?uence of the Powers in Africa. The sole important innovation is the obligation laid on the members of the League by the terms of the third article but, though they must submit their cases, there is no obligation, other than moral, upon them to accept the decisions arrived at. Finally, in the absence of any provision to the contrary, it is to be presumed that the right of any State to secede from the union is maintained. In short, the League to Enforce Peace, thus conceived, would not constitute a federal union, but would at most be a somewhat more elaborately organised concert or alliance of-sovereign Powers.
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