However this may be, the question as to whether the United States is by the British-American Arbitration Treaty compelled to consent to have the dispute concerning the interpretation of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty brought before the Permanent Court of Arbitration is of minor importance. For, even if she be not compelled to do so, it must nevertheless be expected that she will do so. If any dispute is, by its very character, fit and destined to be settled by arbitration, it is this dispute, which is clearly of a legal nature and at the same time one which concerns the interpretation of treaties. Neither the independence, nor the honour, nor any vital interest of the parties can be said to be involved in the dispute. Indeed it may be maintained that much more important than the dispute itself is the question whether it will or will not be settled by arbitration. Great Britain has already declared that if the dispute cannot be settled by means of diplomacy, she will request arbitration. The eyes of the whole world are directed upon the United States in order to find out her resolution. Throughout her history, the United States has been a champion of arbitration, and no other State has so frequently offered to go, or consented to submit, to arbitration. It was the United States who at the First, as well as the Second, Hague Peace Conference led the party which desired that arbitration should be made obligatory for a number of differences, and she will, I am sure, renew her efforts at the approaching Third Peace Conference. Should she refuse to go to arbitration in her present dispute with Great Britain, the whole movement for arbitration would, for a generation at least, be discredited and come to a standstill. For if the leader of the movement is false to all his declarations and aspirations in the past, the movement itself must be damaged and its opponents must be victorious. Prominent Americans are alive to this indubitable fact, and it would seem to be appropriate to conclude this study with the text of the letter of Mr Thomas Willing Balch of Philadelphia--the worthy son of his father who was the first to demand the settlement of the Alabama dispute by arbitration--which the _New York Sun_, an influential American paper, published on September 4, 1912, on its editorial page. "To the Editor of the _Sun_. Sir:--