The distinct and prompt refusal by the American Commissioners to submit questions at issue between them and their Spanish colleagues to arbitration marks a limit to the application of that principle in international controversy which even…
Whitelaw Reid
The Public Record
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, diplomat and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history.
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No civilized nation is more thoroughly committed to the policy of international arbitration than the United States.
But the American Commissioners at once made it clear that the rational place for arbitration is as a substitute for war, not as a second remedy, to which the contestant may still have a right to resort after having exhausted the first.
It may choose arbitration, or it may choose war; but the American Commissioners flatly refused to let it choose war, and then, after defeat, claim still the right to call in arbitrators and put again at risk before them the verdict of war.
Arbitration comes before war, they insisted, to avert its horrors; not after war, to afford the defeated party a chance yet to escape its consequences.
Americans were surprised to find how completely it was overlooked in the contemporaneous European discussion--how general was the sympathy with the Spanish request for arbitration, and how naïf the apparently genuine surprise at the…
The more clearly the American view is now recognized and accepted, the greater must be the tendency in the future to seek arbitration at the outset.
To refuse arbitration when only sought at the end of war, and as a means of escaping its consequences, is certainly to stimulate efforts for averting war at the beginning of difficulties by means of arbitration.
The refusal prevents such degradation of a noble reform to an ignoble end as would make arbitration the refuge, not of those who wish to avoid war, but only of those who have preferred war and been beaten at it.
The American precedent should thus become a powerful influence for promoting the cause of genuine international arbitration, and so for the preservation of peace between nations.
Equally unexpected and important to the development of ordered liberty and good government in the world was the American refusal to accept any responsibility, for themselves or for the Cubans, on account of the so-called Cuban debt.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.