Justice & Law Quote by Ludwig Quidde

“Great progress” lands with the careful optimism of a man who knows progress is usually a euphemism. Quidde isn’t praising peace as a moral aspiration; he’s praising process. The point is almost bureaucratic on purpose: real restraint doesn’t come from lofty declarations but from pre-commitment. “Pledge in advance” is the spine of the sentence. It signals an awareness of how states behave when tempers flare: they improvise justifications, not compromises. Binding yourself before the crisis is the only way to prevent the crisis from writing the rules.

The second clause does the real work. Quidde insists treaties must “specify the composition of the court” and “its procedure,” because he understands that neutrality isn’t a vibe; it’s architecture. Who sits on the bench, how evidence is heard, what counts as admissible, how enforcement is imagined: these details are where power hides. He’s arguing that peace can’t be sustained by rhetoric alone; it has to be engineered so that even adversaries can trust the mechanism more than they distrust each other.

Context matters: Quidde, a German liberal pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lived through the era when Europe flirted with international law (Hague Conferences, arbitration talk) while stockpiling the tools for World War I. That tension pulses beneath his measured tone. The subtext is a warning: without institutions that are explicit, procedural, and hard to wiggle out of, “peace” remains a poster slogan pinned to a mobilization order.