INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNALS 825 INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNALS IN THE LIGHT OF THE HISTORY OF LAW WITH law shall our land be built up and settled, and with lawlessness wasted and spoiled." ^ These words of Njal, the Icelandic lawgiver of the tenth century, might well come from the mouth of a twentieth-century advocate of international union. In those days, as in these, the problem was to put an end to fight- ing; only now the field is the whole world, and the fighting between nations. With law courts newly established and of doubtful powers, with private warfare everywhere prevalent, the desire of every wise man among that primitive people was not so much that he or his neigh- bor should get their rights, as that the land should not be despoiled. And in the long run Njal prevailed. There were failures of the law; Njal himself was burnt in his own house for a blood feud. But his death was atoned for according to law, and the slayers banished. The popular demand was for more law, more courts, and stronger ones; gradually private warfare ceased, and the land was built up. A similar evolution can be discerned in the history of many coun- tries, and is still going on wherever civilization is developing.^ As the establishment of law courts is usually one of the first steps in the organization of national Hfe, because the most imperatively called for,^ so the feature in the various plans for a league of nations, which makes the most urgent appeal, is the attempt to set up some tribunal to try disputes between states. Most of the objections now made to international tribunals were applicable to courts of law when they first were set up in primitive communities. Some of the more important of them are as follows:
- The Story of Burnt Njal (transl. by G. W. Dasent), 222.
- In a sketch dealing only with well-known facts, it has not seemed useful to give
many references. Conclusions common to several authors have been stated without acknowledgment, even when the language of one of them has to some extent been borrowed. ' Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 281.
