of 1625 the modern methods used in editing classical authors, was the fortieth edition in Latin; the new Washington translation of the book (Carnegie Endowment) will be its twenty-fourth translation. When it appears, sixtyfour editions of this work of difficult contents will have been submitted to the public.

Grotius did not plan to write on international law, nor did he plan to write on the philosophy of law. What, then, was his intention? He desired to write on those parts of law on earth which are not municipal law of one single state (ius civile). Therefore, his book covers that law which, first of all, is common to all mankind, either living within a state (a nation), or in tribes, or in territories without any organization of authority (the two latter tracts representing nearly the whole America of his days, Grotius, II, 2, 2), and which, in the second place, is common to different states (or nations, or princes). A rule of law, in his view, binds together not only the citizens of one country, but also the members-men and nations-of the society of mankind. It is this constitution of his book which implies that he considers interstate relations in the closest parallelism with municipal relations between citizens; a parallelism lending the happiest support to his conclusions.

Would it have been practical to make a division, in 1625, between international law conditions on one side and all municipal (national) law conditions on the other? Grotius does not even raise the question. The chief wars which disturbed or menaced Europe in his days-and war was the huge phenomenon which was the center of his interest-were not international wars. He lived, as an exile, in France, torn by civil wars of several types, wars of grandees against the crown, wars of religion; the war of his country, the United Provinces, against Spain had not been an international war until the truce of 1609; the horrible thirty years' war in Germany and the rôle of foreign countries in it was but partially a war between nation and nation; the war against the invading Turk, who was watching in the background, was to be much more of a war between Christendom and Islam than a war between two or three states.

Now Grotius, placing himself upon the solid ground of recognized law conditions within established states, argues that within these states there are, apart from municipal statutes and municipal customs, rules of law binding the citizens just because they bind all mankind, and that normally the state authorities, in abnormal cases the citizens themselves, are both entitled and obliged to enforce these rules by constraint, by iuris executio, by coercitio. Especially that part of coercitio which depends upon arms or armed force, capital punishment, subduing of rebels, called for his attention. This coercitio, however, never gives the authorities or the citizens a right either arbitrarily to act (no peccandi licentia), nor to violate the laws of humanity, nor to break faith (fides): their conduct in this capacity is bound by strict rules. Grotius traces these rules with the utmost care.

It is in entire accordance with this simple explanation that he treats both the right of coercion in territories with only tribal authorities or without any authority at all, pirates being included, and the right of coercion as between states (nations, princes). The one great difference is this, that where municipal authorities are absent, the wronged ones themselves (either individuals or nations and princes) will have to act. But in both cases lawful coercion consists in a iuris executio of rules common to mankind; armed coercion never gives either a right arbitrarily to act, or a right to violate the laws of humanity, or a right to break faith, or a right to despise binding rules of conduct. Armed coercion as between states (bellum publicum) is mainly a means of redress against injustice and crimes (state injustice and state crimes); and the rules of just warfare in the third part of Grotius's book are not rules for any belligerent nation, but rules obligating that nation or those nations which perform a iuris executio. It seems to me that Judge Moore in his recent essays (1924, pp. 7-8, 37) does not do full justice to this aspect of Grotius's argument. His conception of state injustice or state crimes and their indispensable redress by armed force seems quite modern; it is only since 1914 that the problem of states behaving as criminals and the problem of punishing a culprit state has occupied the public mind. Grotius's conception materially coincides with the platform of the American League to Enforce Peace (1915), the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and, above all, the Geneva Protocol (October 2, 1924). Of course he does not advocate any compulsory collective action of the nations except as against the Turk (hostis impius). But many times he recommends to nations to help each other to right wrongs and punish crimes. It is especially in his chapter on punishments (II, 20) and in the third part of his book that he pronounces himself very distinctly on this topic.

By this parallelism between state coercion and interstate coercion, Grotius takes a strong position against those dangerous opponents among the Protestants of his day who felt averse to any warfare as being contrary to the paramount truth of Christianity. Peaceful though he is in heart and soul, he does not get tired of telling them that international defense against public wrong or crime, international war to redress or punish such acts, is exactly the same thing, though on a larger scale, as is municipal administration of justice and police. If the latter is deemed indispensable, why not the former? If Christ never reproached Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea for being judges, passing sentences of capital punishment, how could he have denied that righteous war is an application of exactly the same principle?

But, if Grotius succeeded in maintaining his position against pacifistsamong the number of whom, alas, had to be reckoned also his venerated fellow-countryman Erasmus-a much more dangerous foe stood waiting for him in the shape of those who denied the existence of any law really binding on princes or nations: Machiavelli before him, Hobbes after him, nearly

all ruling statesmen from the sixteenth to the present century, and the practice of international law itself up to 1914. These were his real adversaries; the real opponents at whom his book was aimed. It is too well known in what manner he forces upon his readers his conviction that the same unwritten law is binding on all mankind, on princes and nations as well as on plain citizens. As cleverly pointed out by Robert Ward in his book of 1795, he searched all the codes of law and ethics he could get hold of, all branches of science, all trends of opinion, seeing how much his book would need a very strong and large basis. He drew his material from the whole range of classical authors, from Homer up to the youngest Fathers of the Church -lawyers and law books of course included-and from the whole tenor of Scripture. He demonstrated which are the guiding principles, found constantly and everywhere within these revered documents. He cemented them into a solid, well-proportioned system: he did so in a succinct style, heaping facts and quotations upon facts and quotations, almost never indulging in speculations or sentimental considerations. If Grotius had not given this solid foundation to his book, as well as to the paper of his youth on the law of spoils (1605, published 1868), it would have remained a set of one person's views, a doctrine guiding only the expounder himself and his pupils. Now it became a book based on the impressive authority of ten centuries; and he rightly tries in his annotations of 1642 and 1646 to enlarge and to enrich as much as possible the range of his quotations and arguments, recognizing that here lies one of the bulwarks of his reasoning. In this characteristic of Grotius's book-and the event has shown how right he was in thinking this method necessary-is to be found an answer to the question why Grotius was better qualified for this juridical book than his predecesHis predecessors, eminent though several of them were and much as Grotius avows himself indebted to their scientific work, had been either theologians, most of them Jesuits or Spaniards, or both, or jurists, many of them Spaniards or Jesuits also. Grotius was better qualified than they because of his rare scholarship in the domain both of letters and theology; nobody could have performed the underlying labor but a thorough philologist and thorough theologian as Grotius, who practically knew everything written by sacred or classical authors and who knew practically every event in ancient or biblical history. His Florum sparsio in ius Justinianeum (1642) gives another striking proof of this quality of Grotius. He moreover was gifted in a high degree with the art of systematizing his materials, and with the art of making prudent selections. The difficulties alluded to by Gentilis in the exordium of his book (1589) broke down before Grotius's natural talents. He shaped, says a Dutch admirer (Cras, 1775, 1796) "from a rough and formless mass an elegant science, just as a great sculptor shapes a Venus from a rude block of marble." He had the advantage of being an eminent representative of the two great currents of scholarship of his time: on one hand, having the gift patiently and carefully to collect materials, to

sors.

examine and sift them, which had been the secret of the French school of the sixteenth century; on the other hand, having that mighty desire of construction and synthesis that grew out of the destruction and analysis inseparable from the reformation movement. The charge brought against Grotius in the appendix of the Georgetown University Lectures of 1920, 1921 (edited by Edmund A. Walsh) of owing too much to his predecessors seems not only unfounded, if one looks up in detail what Grotius borrowed from his several predecessors and how he borrowed it, but it dwindles away as soon as one asks the opponents to give the names of a single book or of a combination of two or three books which might have replaced the book of 1625. They cannot. It is not astonishing at all that in the Americas of his time, and of more than a century afterwards, Grotius did not find either notable students or adherents. Not scholarship, but toil and fight for their existence was the work of the people over there. Nor was his book of any importance in the Dutch East Indies, in continental Asia or Africa. Latin folios and quartos and duodecimos did not suit these dominions beyond the seas. In Europe, Grotius's work was not esteemed in the latter part of the eighteenth and former part of the nineteenth century when "state sovereignty" was the watchword, and international law a garment which the nations tore and threw off whenever it suited their interests to do so. But its importance increased when the peace movement became stronger (1871), and when the Hague Peace Conferences and the League of Nations meetings came near. As a counterpart to Grotius's redress of state injuries by armed force (security), we notice his conviction of common rules of law being superior to the desires of single states. The arbitration movement, quite feeble in Grotius's day, advocated by him only in a few eloquent lines, but adopted from the very first by the United States, and victorious at Geneva in October last, is akin to this second tendency of Grotius's doctrine. Here is another reason why his book has the atmosphere of a modern book.

Though by these qualities the book of 1625 still affords to its present readers a warm intellectual pleasure, it strikes them by showing several gaps where they expected to find explanations and instances.

The most striking feature in this respect is its silence on private international law, protection of citizens abroad, and treaties. The statute law of one single country, the other parts of municipal law, and the separate treaties a nation negotiates with its neighbors are not, by far, as interesting to Grotius as is the general law of all mankind and all nations. In consequence, he very seldom touches on those problems of conflicts of municipal (national) laws which deal with citizens of different countries in their mutual relations, or with citizens of one country resident in another country; nor does he pay more than occasional attention to the problem of states protecting their citizens abroad, a problem most important in its consequences for the practice of international law then and now. And as Grotius did not intend to write a student's textbook on international law as it stood in

1625-critics often overlook this fact-he is silent as to treaties concluded between states either in the middle ages or in his own day, though his earlier annotations and his historical works show how familiar he was with them.

Another negative feature of the book arises from the fact that Grotius, in order to keep his book free from suspicions as to political preferences and censures, never speaks intentionally of contemporary events. He gives his reasons for this silence in the prolegomena of his book and in a letter of August 1, 1625. Nevertheless, it could not have been difficult for the reader of his time to trace in the policy of Philip of Macedon the unscrupulous policy of Machiavelli's Principe and his imitators, nor to recognize in so many instances of ancient princes and statesmen and generals the history of their own times. Patrick Henry, on November 25, 1791, in the state capitol at Richmond, Virginia, argued for a whole day on the matter of the British Debts Case on the strength of what Alexander the Great allowed to the Thessalians with regard to their Theban debts (Grotius, III, 8, 4); and likewise, it is not too difficult for us to recognize twentieth century events in many of Grotius's predicaments.

What Grotius, however, does not omit is the mention of the many complications which real international intercourse adds to the simplicity of his system. Of these exceptions, which render his book complex, because reality itself is complex and diverse, the most important ones are the instance of "doubtful" cases of war, when both parties seem to be right, or think themselves to be victims of injustice, and the juridical consequences of a war that is formally right, as being fought between sovereign states and as having been duly declared. Allowing full room for the reservations which these exceptions necessitate, Grotius does not leave his thread, and does. not allow the exceptions, important though they are, to cover and darken his main topic.

Only those who are unfamiliar with Grotius's mind can feel amazed at his abstinence from suggestions for a remote future. He is neither a Sully, nor a William Penn, nor an Abbé de Saint-Pierre. His book is meant to be a book of realities.

Is it, then, the lapse of time above all, the realities of 1625 as opposed to those of 1925, which prevents Grotius's book from being entirely suited to our present needs? No, it is not; the ways in which states behaved in 1625 and in which they behaved about 1914 are not essentially different, and how to devise redress of state injustice and state crimes was then the great international difficulty, as it is now. Nor is the old-fashioned form of Grotius's book its main obstacle. The one prominent characteristic which renders it inadequate for us is its basis of the natural law and the voluntary law of nations, drawn from the rules and lessons of Scripture and classical authors as if they were one uniform whole. For more than one century we have been learning to regard law as a thing of incessant historical develop