[Sidenote: Executive power not necessary for an international court.] 65. We have neither desire nor need to equip these courts with executive power. In the internal life of states it is necessary for courts to possess executive power because the conditions of human nature demand it. Just as there will always be individual offenders, so there will always be individuals who will only yield to compulsion. But states are a different kind of person from individual men; their present-day constitution on the generally prevalent type has made them, so to say, more moral than in the times of absolutism. The personal interests and ambition of sovereigns, and their passion for an increase of their might, have finished playing their part in the life of peoples. The real and true interests of states and the welfare of the inhabitants of the state have taken the place thereof. Machiavellian principles are no longer prevalent everywhere. The mutual intercourse of states is carried on in reliance on the sacredness of treaties. Peaceable adjustment of state disputes is in the interests of the states themselves, for war is nowadays an immense moral and economic evil even for the victor state. It may be that a state will decline to submit its cause to the international tribunal because it thinks that its vital interests do not allow such submission; but when, after weighing its interests, it has once declared itself ready to appear before the court, it will also accept the court's award. All other motives apart, the strong state will do this, because its strength allows it to make voluntary submission to the award, and the weak state will also do so because war would be hopeless for it. [Sidenote: Right of intervention by third states and war as _ultima ratio_.]