tutional and international law, he exercised a powerful influence upon the development of American thought. By voluminous correspondence with many foremost Americans who were engaged in public affairs he made his influence felt upon the solution of specific questions in the conduct of government. A correspondence of many years with Charles Sumner is especially rich in matter of this description.

The philosophical habit of the German, the practical habit of the Englishman, the freedom from traditional limitations upon thought of the American, the breadth of view of his cosmopolitan experience, the intensity of his enthusiasm at once for liberty and for order, and the strength of his genuine sympathy for all mankind combined to set him in advance of his time in his views upon international law and his proposals for its development. We find him writing to Sumner on the 27th of December, 1861, after the Trent Affair-more than fifty years ago:

This would be a fair occasion to propose a congress of all maritime nations, European and American, to settle some more canons of the law of nations than were settled at the Peace of Paris, canons chiefly or exclusively relating to the rights and duties of belligerents and neutrals on the sea; for there lies the chief difficulty. The sea belongs to all; hence the difficulty of the sea police, because there all are equals. I mean no codification of international law; I mean that such a congress, avowedly convened for such a purpose, should take some more canons out of the cloudy realm of precedents than the Peace of Paris did almost incidentally. Suppose Russia, Austria, and other nations. (naming them) could be induced to send, each power, two jurists (with naval advisers if they chose), does any one, who knows how swelling civilization courses in our history, doubt that their debates and resolutions would remain useless,—even though the whole should lead, this time, to no more than an experiment? All those ideas that are now great and large blessings of our race, having wrought themselves into constitutions or law systems, belonged once to Utopia.

On the 16th of April, 1866, he writes to Bluntschli in Heidelberg:

Your intention to write a brief code on the Rights of Nations, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is a noble and daring one. For a long time it was a favorite project of mine that four or five of the most distinguished jurists should hold a congress in order to decide on several important but still unsettled

questions of national equity, and perhaps draw up a code. First I proposed that it should be an official congress under the government, and corresponded with Senator Sumner on the subject. But after awhile it became clear to me that it would be much better if a private congress were established, whose work would stand as an authority by its excellence, truthfulness, justice, and superiority in every respect.

June 18, 1866, to his wife:

Have you read the noble declaration of Prussia, that she will not capture enemies' property at sea during war? Such things warm one like a glass of burgundy.

* * *

December 15, 1866, to Andrew D. White:

I fancy sometimes-but only fancy-how fine a thing it would be for one of the Peabodies, or some such gold vessel, to give, say twenty-five thousand dollars gold, for the holding of a private-i. e., not diplomatic, although international-congress of some eight or ten jurists, to concentrate international authority and combined weight on certain great points, on which we have now only individual authorities. I have spoken about this years ago to Mr. Field.

On the 11th of June, 1868, to Sumner:

What an advance it would be-though requiring nearly twenty-two centuries-from the time when Thucydides said that private property was not acknowledged at sea as on land, to the middle of the nineteenth century, when private property-even of the enemy-should be declared to be protected, even floating without defense, on the wide sea. * * * I say that civilization would hardly have made or be able to make a greater stride in our century, than by the United States and North Germany agreeing on the great principle and thus inducing others to follow.

On May 7, 1869, to Judge Thayer:

The strength, authority, and grandeur of the law of nations rests on, and consists in, the very fact that reason, justice, equity, speak through men "greater than he who takes a city"-single men, plain Grotius; and that nations, and even Congresses of

Vienna, cannot avoid hearing, acknowledging, and quoting them. But it has ever been, and is still, a favorite idea of mine that there should be a congress of from five to ten acknowledged jurists to settle a dozen or two of important yet unsettled pointsa private and boldly self-appointed congress, whose whole authority should rest on the inherent truth and energy of their own proclama.

On the 10th of April, 1872, to General Dufour, Honorary President of the International Committee of Geneva:

One of far the most effectual and beneficent things that, at this very juncture, could be done for the promotion of the intercourse of nations in peace or war (and there is intercouse in war, since man cannot meet man without intercourse)-one of the most promising things in matters of internationalism, would be the meeting of the most prominent jurists of the law of nations, of our Cis-Caucasian race-one from each country in their individual and not in any public capacity-to settle among themselves certain great questions of the law of nations as yet unsettled, such as neutrality, or the aid of barbarians, or the duration of the claims of obligations, of citizenship. I mean settle as Grotius settled, by the strength of the great argument of justice. A code of proclamation, as it were, of such a body, would soon acquire far greater authority than the book of the greatest single jurist. I hope such a meeting may be brought about in 1874.

On the 26th of May, 1872, to Von Holtzendorff:

In 1846, in one of my writings, I recalled the fact that under Adrian, professors were appointed to lecture in different places, and Polemon of Laodicea instructed in oratory at Rome, Laodicea, Smyrna and Alexandria. The traveling professor had a free passage on the emperor's ships, or on the vessels laden with grain. In our days of steamboats and railroads the traveling professor should be reinstated. Why could not the same person teach in New York and in Strasburg?

You will perceive that here was a proposal of the exchange professorship, which we are putting in practice forty years after. Here was another proposal which was realized by the formation of the Institute of International Law. Of this Professor Bluntschli says:

Lieber had great influence, I may add, in founding the Institut de Droit International, which was started in Ghent, in 1873, and

forms a permanent alliance of leading international jurists from all civilized nations, for the purpose of working harmoniously together, and thus serving as an organ for the legal consciousness of the civilized world. Lieber was the first to propose and to encourage the idea of professional jurists of all nations thus coming together for consultation, and seeking to establish a common understanding. From this impulse proceeded Rolin-Jaequemyn's circular letter, drawn up in Ghent, calling together a number of men eminent for their learning. This latter proposal to found a permanent academy for International Law met with general acceptance, but this was merely a further development of the original idea of Lieber, which was at the bottom of the whole scheme.

Here also was the proposal for a meeting of official representatives which was the precursor of the conferences at The Hague. It is interesting to observe that while Lieber considered the unofficial meeting to be an alternative for the official one, both have been realized, and in practice the work of the unofficial members of the Institute of International Law has made possible the success of the official conferences at The Hague, by preparing their work beforehand and agreeing upon conclusions which the official conferences could accept. The important characteristic which marshaled all Lieber's forces for leadership of opinion and gave his work its chief and permanent value was an elevation of spirit, a pervading moral quality which was refined by adversity and trial throughout the formative period of his life; and this quality was well expressed by two maxims which he made his guides. He says, in writing to Judge Thayer:

From early times I observed that in the French Revolution people had always clamored for rights and never thought of duty; that more or less this is the case in all periods of agitation, and almost universally so in our own times and in our country * * * right and duty: both together, and all is well; right alone, despotism,-duty alone, slavery.

And, writing to Sumner, he says:

Let me now give you what I consider my chief law maxim: Nullum jus sine officio, nullum officium sine jure,-forgotten by despot and Rouge (they want nothing but rights), forgotten by the slave who thinks he has nothing but duty or obligation.

And this he condensed into the maxim: "Droit oblige."

The other maxim he kept displayed on the walls of his lecture room: "Patria Cara: Carior Libertas: Veritas Carissima." And these maxims he exemplified in his life and in his service to mankind.

He was no dry student delving for knowledge he could not use; but a living soul instinct with human sympathy and love of liberty and justice seizing eagerly the weapons of learning to strike blows in the struggle for nobler and happier life among men. He was no vapid theorist who "argued about it and about, and evermore came out the same door wherein he went," but a sagacious, practical man among men, dealing with human nature as it was, with all its weakness and folly and error, all its nobility and power; and seeking to shape the human material upon which he wrought to its best uses according to its real capacity and strength.

It was a wonderful career. It was a great thing to be the author of the Instructions. It was a great thing to give the impetus which produced the Institut de Droit International and made possible the success of the Hague Conferences. It was a great thing to be the man he was and to live a long life, loving learning and law and liberty and country, and kind, and blessed by consciousness of distinguished service to them all. It stirs the imagination that the boy who lay wounded on the battlefield of Namur for his country's sake and who languished in prison for liberty's sake and who left his native land that he might be free, should build his life into the structure of American self-government and leave a name honored by scholars and patriots the world over.

If our Society, at once national and international, were about to choose a patron saint, and the roll were to be called, my voice for one would answer "Francis Lieber."