Hamilton Holt

“ At last all the peoples of the world have achieved in some measure representative government. Russia has its Duma; China has announced that shortly it will promulgate a constitution, while Turkey and Persia have each just gone through the throes of revolution and emerged with a vigorous parliament. If Kant's philosophy is sound, therefore, the world is at last ready for world organization and universal peace. ”

“ The creation of a world federation commission would guarantee to our own people as well as to the peoples of the world that the United States is in earnest and ready to take the lead in the only practical and promising method of obtaining international peace. ”

“ Today there is no such thing as a code of international law which is binding on the nations. What passes under the name of international law is simply a series of arguments, maxims, precedents and opinions. It is the work, not of legislators, but of scholars. The nations are at perfect liberty to accept it or reject it as they wish. ”

“ If the world federation commission is appointed by the United States government with Theodore Roosevelt as chairman, can anyone believe that the day will not be brought measurably nearer, when as Victor Hugo prophesied in 1849, "the only battlefield will be the market opening to commerce and the human mind opening to new ideas?" ”

“ Roosevelt in his remarkable Nobel peace address the other day at Christiania goes so far as to urge a "league of peace" to abolish war, paradoxically, by force if necessary. The governments themselves, however, have not yet officially recognized that world organization is the goal of international effort, though they have unconsciously and inevitably been driven much faster and farther along this path than they realize. ”

“ In his famous essay Perpetual Peace published in 1795, Emanuel Kant declared that we can never have universal peace until the world is politically organized, and it will never be possible to organize the world politically until the majority of the nations have a representative form of government. ”

“ The beginnings of world organization, however, have already taken place. In the Hague Court and the recurring Hague Conferences we see the germs of the international court and the parliament of man. The problem is how to develop these so that they will become the judicial and legislative departments. of a powerful world constitution, just as our Articles of Confederation and Continental Congress developed into the present United States Constitution, which a century of storm and stress has not broken and which still serves as a model to all the republics of the earth. ”