Although the Naval Conference which met at London, December 4, 1908, grew out of the Second Peace Conference it differed from the latter both in its composition and its object.

In an historic session at the Hague, in June 1907, Germany and England proposed to the powers assembled to establish an international prize court. The two projects were referred to the first commission, and by the latter to a subcommission, which again appointed a committee of three, (Renault of France, Kriege of Germany, and Crowe of Great Britain) to combine them and draw up a project for submission to the commission.

It is hard to realize the significance of the work of those three jurists, each as familiar with the practical transaction of international business as with the theory and underlying principles of international law. To them, primarily, is due the elaboration of the convention for the establishment of an international prize court. Nor should we forget that the American delegation at the Hague gave the project its vigorous support, so that it was presented to the conference in the name of four of the greatest maritime powers.

In the public life of modern states, political and economic motives of action are so closely interwoven that the student of politics rarely encounters a situation or institution in which he can trace and study purely political principles. Indeed, the struggle for political power and for recognized authority, the effort to give the stamp of public sanction to this or that policy, is always the focus of public life; but the action of the participants in the political drama is determined largely by non-political motives. We have to go back to the Athenean republic or to the Whig rule in eighteenth century England to see the political factor in its clearest and most detached manifestations. It is there that we see a society highly capable and cultivated, concentrating all its attention upon that dramatic struggle for power, that attempt to gain leadership over other men by ascendancy in counsel, which form the true essence of politics. Among modern nations, with their democratic organization, with vast material interests clamoring for attention, purely political considerations are apt to be overshadowed by those of economic and social import, although it always remains interesting to compare and measure nations with regard to their ability to express and deal with the principles of their life in the forms and activities of political counsel.

In the contest of the western powers of Europe to colonize the New World, France, owing to a mistaken policy, failed completely and saw her flag and sovereignty practically driven back from this hemisphere. The early attempts of Admiral de Coligny to colonize the Huguenots first in Brazil and then in Florida, were, owing to the indifference and even opposition of the French crown, abortive. And in the later effort of the French crown to colonize in Canada and Louisiana, the attempt to bring over the remains of feudalism as opposed to the strong individualism that characterized the English settlers, reinforced by the Hollanders in New Netherlands, the Swedes and the Germans in Pennsylvania, and the Huguenots in Virginia and the Carolinas, doomed the French settlers, in the valley of the Saint Lawrence and at the mouth of the Mississippi, to defeat in their effort to extend their language and supremacy over the continent of North America.