Foreword

THERE are two conventional ways of settling disputes between nations--diplomacy and. war. Throughout the ages they have in general been the limited alternatives available for the adjustment of controversies in the international field. And much of the history of the world is the record of the gradual accumulation of grievances, feigned or real, between nations; the breakdown of the machinery of negotiation or conciliation which we call diplomacy; the slow spread of suspicion, wariness, hostility, and hate; and the overflow of those attitudes into war. 'We on this continent adopted a different method for settling this class of controversies. The colonies who separated from their mother country were separate sovereign States. Though they were jealous of their sovereign prerogatives, they realized the risks involved if they were not united in a working society governed by law. There was the problem of the common defense. There were also the important problems of commercial intercourse, finance, and the host of other social, economic and political problems which these neighboring people had in common. And so they formed a compact-the Constitution of the United States. By terms of that compact, controversies between the States are settled by the processes of law. The Supreme Court is given original jurisdiction over these cases and controversies. It is there that complaints are filed, issues joined, questions of fact resolved, and principles of law applied. Many of those controversies would, in other parts of this planet, precipitate war-boundary disputes, conflicting claims over water rights, and the like. But one of our unique contributions in the history of government has been the substitution of law in this area for diplomacy and war. Law is man's refuge on his escape from the jungle. Dr. Albert Einstein was recently speaking about the necessity of building a system of law-that is to say, world government-around