1899, it will remain quite understood that the deliberations of the proposed assembly should affect neither the political relations between states, nor the order of affairs established by treaties, nor, in general, the questions which do not fall directly within the programme adopted by the cabinets."

This condition, however, was not indorsed by all of the governments when they accepted the Russian invitation to be represented at the conference, and they accordingly made certain reserves. The United States reserved the liberty of submitting two supplementary questions, namely: that of the reduction or limitation of armaments, and that of an agreement to observe certain limitations in the use of force for the collection of ordinary public debts arising from contracts.

Spain expressed its desire to discuss the limitation of armaments, and reserved the right of introducing this question.

Great Britain announced that it attached great importance to having the question of expenditures for armaments discussed, and reserved the right of introducing it; it also reserved the right of abstaining from the discussion of any question mentioned in the Russian programme which should appear to it to lead to no useful result.

Japan believed that certain questions not specifically enumerated in the programme might be profitably included among those to be examined, and reserved the right of abstaining or withdrawing from any discussion taking or promising to take a direction not conducive, in its judgment, to a useful result.

Bolivia, Denmark, Greece, and the Netherlands also. reserved the right of proposing for consideration other

subjects analogous to those specifically mentioned in the Russian programme.

Germany and Austria reserved the right of abstaining from the discussion of any question not appearing to tend towards a practical result.

Even Russia, after being informed of these various reservations, declared that it would maintain its programme of April, 1906, as the basis of the deliberations of the conference, but that it would reserve in its turn the right of abstaining from the discussion of any question not appearing to tend towards a practical result.

At least eleven of the countries invited having made reservations as to the programme, and some of them in a very positive, not to say belligerent, manner, it looked for a time as though the second Peace Conference would have a very stormy career, or would probably not enter upon any career at all. But through the persuasive influence of diplomacy, and especially, it is believed, as a result of a visit made by Professor de Martens, of Russia, to several of the great powers which had made reservations, it was decided that they would send representatives to the conference, and that, in the words of Chancellor von Bülow, of Germany, they would be "content to leave to those powers which are convinced that such discussions will yield a genuinely successful result, the burden of carrying them on.”

This decision was carried out, and all the powers were represented at the conference; but at its second session. (its first real business session), the United States delegation reserved the right of presenting "the question of the collection of public debts by force, or any other question not mentioned in the programme"; and the British delegation also reserved "the right of formulating new propositions

later." President Nelidow admitted the right claimed by the two delegations, but ruled that every new proposition, not included within the subjects enumerated in the programme, should first be communicated in writing to the president of the conference and immediately printed and distributed among the members. This ruling was accepted, and thus the first great obstacle of the second conference was avoided.

IX. ARMAMENTS

a. THE CONFERENCE OF 1899

For centuries it has been the belief of the civilized world that "if you wish for peace, you must prepare for war" (si vis pacem, para bellum); and for centuries it acted upon that belief. But it remained for Prince Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" of Germany, to develop this rather vague and often insincere belief into a genuine "barracks philosophy," which was applied by him most vigorously in his own country and was adopted with as much thoroughness as possible by the governments of other European states. Possessed not so much by a genuine love of peace as by a genuine fear of the consequences of war, Bismarck converted Prussia and Germany into a modern Sparta as nearly as the circumstances of the Nineteenth Century would permit; and the other statesmen of Europe, following his example, made of Europe an armed camp.

The creation and increase of armaments went on at such a pace that "armed peace" became more burdensome than actual war had been a generation before; and, like the medieval knights who, settling disputes by appeals to the ordeal of battle, had so increased their armor that its weight kept them prone upon their backs if they chanced to fall, so the civilized states of Europe came to see that their appeal to the god of battles for the settlement of disputes involved such enormous expenditures in time of

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peace began.

These considerations burned themselves in upon the minds of the peoples, upon whose backs the military burden necessarily rested, and when Bismarck fell from power in 1890 they hoped that his system of "blood and iron" would end. Less than a month after Bismarck's death (July 30, 1898), the Czar issued his rescript for the first Peace Conference, and the peoples at once made their wish the father of their thought and said that now disarmament would surely come.

But it was not disarmament that the Czar's rescript proposed. It did allude to "a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations" as an "ideal towards which the endeavors of all governments should be directed." It denounced the system of increasing armaments as "a blow at the public prosperity in its very source," as "paralyzing or checking the development of national culture, economic progress, and the production of wealth," as a prime cause of economic crises, and as an "inevitable cause of the very cataclysm it is designed to avert." And it contained these emphatic words: "To put an end to these incessant armaments and to seek the means of warding off the calamities which threaten the whole world-such is the supreme duty which is imposed to-day upon all states." But it was the increase of armaments that the Russian statesmen had in mind, and that the rescript was designed to emphasize and the conference to consider. When Count Mouravieff read the rescript to the foreign diplomatists he requested the British Ambassador, Sir Charles Scott, to observe that this eloquent appeal, which he had drawn up at the dic