A Case for Arbitration
THE dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay is a test case for all those who have declared their belief—as we have—that the post-War machinery for preventing war is of real value. If the two countries in the end should ignore all the efforts which arc being made to keep the peace, the machinery will unquestion- ably be to some degree discredited. Nor is that the only danger. Other South American Republics are so inti- mately concerned in the affairs of Bolivia and Paraguay that a war which began between the two nations might expand into a war among three, four or five.
It was a coincidence that the Council of the League was sitting at Lugano and the Pan-American Conference was sitting at Washington, when the first war-like acts were committed. Both countries are members of the League, though apparently very negligent members, and the Council was required by every consideration of duty and expediency to call their attention to their obligations. Immediately, however, a menacing compli- cation presented itself. What would the United States say ? That mighty policy of " Hands off the New World," known as the Monroe Doctrine, might be brought into play. Fear of misunderstanding compelled the Council to be very circumspect in the wording of its exhortations to Bolivia and Paraguay. Fortunately no umbrage has been taken in Washington.
At the same time that the Council sent its messages, the Pan-American Conference offered mediation. The representative of Bolivia at the Conference created a bad impression by leaving the Conference, because objec- tion was raised to his proposal that arbitration should be conditional on the promise of compensation from Paraguay. Happily the Government at La Paz ordered its representative to return to the Conference. It would have been too bad an irony if he had been allowed to remain an absentee. For the whole purpose of the Conference is to make a beginning of the policy— introduced with extraordinary skill by Mr. C. E. Hughes at Havana last spring—for making the alleged hegemony of the United States in the New World tolerable by means of a series of arbitration treaties.
. Paraguay, which seems to have been in several ways more amenable than Bolivia, was the first to accept the offer of the Pan-American Conference. Later, Bolivia accepted. The League is quite contented with this promising procedure.
The district called the Chaco, which is the subject of the boundary dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay, has never been assigned in a full legal sense to either country. Both have claimed it, and though a frontier has been mapped more than once, no Treaty recognizing the frontier has ever been ratified. The Bolivians, no doubt, have a special interest in claiming the Chaco, as they sorely need a waterway to the Atlantic, but the great majority of recent settlers in the territory are Paraguayans. The Chaco is composed mostly of swamps, is sparsely inhabited by Indians, and is plagued by an unusual variety of noxious insects. Still, it is being steadily penetrated by settlers, and there is no doubt that it might become very fertile by means of both drainage and irrigation. There is good reason to hope now that there will be no War, though Paraguay when we write has not stopped mobilizing. South America is a long way from Geneva, but, depend upon it, the peace movement would be slowed down, if (however unjustifiably) it were said that all our modern machinery for preserving the peace was useless, merely because each of the combatants called the other the aggressor.
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