Every other agency, regardless of its form, will be found, when analyzed, to be diplomatic in character and subject to those impulses and purposes which generally affect diplomatic negotiations. With a full appreciation of the advantage to be gained for the world at large through the common consideration of a vexatious international question by a body representing all nations, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that such consideration and the action resulting from it are essentially diplomatic in nature. It is, in brief, the transference of a dispute in a particular case from the capitals of the disputants to the place where the delegates of the nations assemble to deliberate together on matters which affect their common interests. It does not--and this we should understand--remove the question from the processes of diplomacy or prevent the influences which enter into diplomacy from affecting its consideration. Nor does it to an appreciable extent change the actual inequality which exists among nations in the matter of power and influence. "On the other hand, justice applied through the agency of an impartial tribunal clothed with an international jurisdiction eliminates the diplomatic methods of compromise and concession and recognizes that before the law all nations are equal and equally entitled to the exercise of their rights as sovereign and independent states. In a word, international democracy exists in the sphere of legal justice and, up to the present time, in no other relation between nations. "Let us, then, with as little delay as possible establish an international tribunal or tribunals of justice with The Hague Court as a foundation; let us provide an easier, a cheaper, and better procedure than now exists; and let us draft a simple and concise body of legal principles to be applied to the questions to be adjudicated. When that has been accomplished--and it ought not to be a difficult task if the delegates of the Governments charged with it are chosen for their experience and learning in the field of jurisprudence--we shall, in my judgment, have done more to prevent international wars through removing their causes than can be done by any other means that has been devised or suggested." The views, which I thus publicly expressed at Boston in September, 1919, while the President was upon his tour of the country in favor of the Covenant of the League of Nations, were the same as those that I held at Paris in December, 1918, before I had seen the President's first draft of a Covenant, as the following will indicate.