With a childlike self-consciousness, they appear to believe that public opinion must represent the view which the American plutocrats think most profitable to themselves.

They have no notion that the widening development of mankind has quite other concerns than material prosperity, commerce, and money-making.

As a matter of fact, public opinion would be far from unanimous, and real compulsion could only be employed by means of war--the very thing which is to be avoided.
We can imagine a Court of Arbitration intervening in the quarrels of the separate tributary countries when an empire like the Roman Empire existed.

Such an empire never can or will arise again.

Even if it did, it would assuredly, like a universal peace league, be disastrous to all human progress, which is dependent on the clashing interests and the unchecked rivalry of different groups.
So long as we live under such a State system as at present, the German Imperial Chancellor certainly hit the nail on the head when he declared, in his speech in the Reichstag on March 30, 1911, that treaties for arbitration between nations must be limited to clearly ascertainable legal issues, and that a general arbitration treaty between two countries afforded no guarantee of permanent peace.