My own views as to the relative value of the settlement of an international controversy, which is by its nature justiciable, by a body of diplomats and of the settlement by a body of trained jurists were fully set forth in an address which I delivered before the American Bar Association at its annual meeting at Boston on September 5,1919.

An extract from that address will show the radical difference between the President’s views and mine.

“While abstract justice cannot [under present conditions] be depended upon as a firm basis on which to constitute an international concord for the preservation of peace and good relations between nations, legal justice offers a common ground where the nations can meet to settle their controversies.  No nation can refuse in the face of the opinion of the world to declare its unwillingness to recognize the legal rights of other nations or to submit to the judgment of an impartial tribunal a dispute involving the determination of such rights.  The moment, however, that we go beyond the clearly defined field of legal justice we enter the field of diplomacy where national interests and ambitions are to-day the controlling factors of national action.  Concession and compromise are the chief agents of diplomatic settlement instead of the impartial application of legal justice which is essential to a judicial settlement.  Furthermore, the two modes of settlement differ in that a judicial settlement rests upon the precept that all nations, whether great or small, are equal, but in the sphere of diplomacy the inequality of nations is not only recognized, but unquestionably influences the adjustment of international differences.  Any change in the relative power of nations, a change which is continually taking place, makes more or less temporary diplomatic settlements, but in no way affects a judicial settlement.

“However, then, international society may be organized for the future and whatever machinery may be set up to minimize the possibilities of war, I believe that the agency which may be counted upon to function with certainty is that which develops and applies legal justice.”

Every other agency, regardless of its form, will be found, when analyzed, to be diplomatic in character and subject to those impulses and purposes which generally affect diplomatic negotiations.  With a full appreciation of the advantage to be gained for the world at large through the common consideration of a vexatious international question by a body representing all nations, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that such consideration and the action resulting from it are essentially diplomatic in nature.  It is, in brief, the transference of a dispute in a particular case from the capitals of the disputants to the place where the delegates of the nations assemble to deliberate together on matters which affect their common interests.  It does not—­and this we should understand—­remove the question from the processes of diplomacy or prevent the influences which enter into diplomacy from affecting its consideration.  Nor does it to an appreciable extent change the actual inequality which exists among nations in the matter of power and influence.