War and International Adjudication: Reflections on the 1899 Peace Conference

A popular belief circulated at the end of the nineteenth century that the establishment of a permanent international court would be an important step toward a world free of war. The purpose of this essay is to renew the authors' sense of the 1899 Peace Conference in terms both of what happened then and of how those events, beliefs, and objectives manifest themselves today. This essay looks back to war and peace at the end of the nineteenth century, to how those ideas were understood and how it was thought that arbitration and judicial settlement of disputes were to play a role in ensuring a more peaceful world.