The members of the Central American Peace Conference, held at Washington in 1907, primarily intent upon devising all possible ways and means of maintaining permanent peace in the Isthmus, sought to introduce into the treaties which resulted from the Conference not only those means and recourses which experience had shown would preserve good understanding and harmony among the five states, but, more particularly, they endeavored to find new methods which would strengthen the desideratum of the Conference by eliminating the causes of civil or interstate wars which might in the future occur in the Central American countries.
Naturally, the arsenal to which the Conference had to turn for the new arms to combat the causes of and prevent all war and revolution, could be none other than historical experience and the principles of international law.