APPENDIX.

Report of Sub-Committee on International Arbitration.

To Hon. WILLIAM D. VEEDER,

Chairman Committee on International Arbitration of the New York State Bar Association, and Associates: GENTLEMEN:- It was your pleasure at the first session of the committee to assign to us the duty of devising and presenting to you a plan for the creation of a Court of Arbitration to which may be submitted. controverted international questions between the governments of Great Britain and the United States.

It may hereafter be worthy of remembrance, and we therefore note the fact, that the first meeting of the committee was held on the 12th day of February, the anniversary of the birth of that great American patriot and statesman, Abraham Lincoln, and the first occasion of its celebration as a public holiday in the Empire State. It seems to us that it was a most fitting occasion for the inauguration of a movement looking to the permanency of peace among nations a day so recently set apart as a memorial in honor of the birth of one who, though the central figure and the controlling genius in the most gigantic war of modern times, was a man who loved peace better than he loved his life, and whose memory savors of the sweetest inspirations of the brotherhood of the

entire human family and of the fatherhood of an inscrutible First Cause.

We have approached this duty with many misgivings. The interests involved in the undertaking are so momentous, the problem to be solved so stupendous, and the action of the committee, if finally crystallized into a system for the eventual abolition of bloodshed among the civilized nations of the world, is freighted with such vast possibilities, that we pause on the threshold of our endeavor, oppressed with a feeling of the inadequateness of man's ability to compass such gigantic conclusion. Our duty, however, seems clear, and that is, to make the trial; and, in memory of blood-washed battle fields on every continent, and of the wrongs and of the rights of humanity everywhere, we apply ourselves to the undertaking with honest effort.

In the outset we find ourselves confronted with a problem of no mean proportions. By the resolution under which the committee is acting, we are expected to devise a plan for the creation of an Anglo-American court, and international only as between the governments of Great Britain and the United States, while no specific instructions have been formulated for our guidance. It is contended by some members of our Association - men who are recognized among the ablest legal writers and practitioners of the Statethat it is quite within the practicable possibilities to create such a court, with only citizens of the two nations to constitute it, and that it is the duty of the committee to formulate such a plan and present it to the Association. As a sub-committee, we find ourselves quite unable to participate in the belief that men of our own or of any profession, in any country,