63. We next are faced by the objection, what possible value can the establishment of international courts possess if it be optional to states either to submit their causes to them or to rely on arms for a decision of those causes? It is, accordingly, asserted that such courts can only be of value if states place themselves under a permanent obligation to submit to them all or at any rate the greater number of their disputes. This leads to the question of obligatory arbitration treaties, which played so prominent a part at the second Peace Conference, and will surely come up again at the third Conference. I have not the slightest doubt that the third or some later Conference will agree on the obligatory reference of certain disputes between states to arbitration, but the matter is of quite subordinate importance so far as the erection of international courts is in question. Any one who contemplates international life and the relations of states to one another, without prejudice and with open eyes, will see quite clearly that, when once there exist international courts, states will voluntarily submit a whole series of cases to them. These will, at first, admittedly, be cases of smaller importance for the most part, but in time more important cases will also come to them, provided that the jurisprudence developed in them is of high quality, and such as to give states a guarantee for decisions at once impartial and purely jural and free from all political prepossessions. _It is the existence of the institution which is the vital question now._ Once the machinery is there, it will be utilized. In all states of the world there are movements and forces at work to secure the ordered and law-protected settlement of international disputes. The existence of an international court will strengthen these movements and forces and render them so powerful that states will scarcely be able to withdraw themselves from their influence. And the time when states were ready to draw the sword on every opportunity belongs to the past. Even for the strongest state war is now an evil, to which recourse is had only as _ultima ratio_, when no other way out presents itself. [Sidenote: What is to be done if a state refuses to accept the decision of an international court?] 64. In conclusion the great question is, what is to happen if a state declines to accept the decision of the international court to which it has appealed? Important as this question may be in theory, it is a minor one in practice. It will scarcely happen in point of fact--assuming that there is an international court of appeal above the court of first instance--that a state will refuse a voluntary acceptance of the award of an international court. Only slowly, and only when irresistibly compelled by their interests so to do, will states submit their disputes to international courts. But when this is the case these same interests will also compel them to accept the award then made.