Great progress was made when arbitration treaties were concluded in which the contracting powers pledge in advance to submit all conflicts to an arbitration court, treaties which not only specify the composition of the court, but also its procedure.
When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.
Thus, if armaments were curtailed without a secure peace and all countries disarmed proportionately, military security would have been in no way affected.
Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained.
The following year, after I had prepared my draft, the Conference of the Interparliamentary Union at The Hague decided to set up a special commission to study the problem seriously.
I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference.
The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.
Every success in limiting armaments is a sign that the will to achieve mutual understanding exists, and every such success thus supports the fight for international law and order.
