Travers Twiss

“ For the Law of Nations, in the received sense of the term, was in a great measure unknown to antiquity, and is not to be confounded with the Jus Gentium of the Roman Law. The Jus Gentium of the Romans was not a body of rules regulating the mutual intercourse of nations, but was that portion of Natural Law to which all mankind does homage, the least as feeling its beneficence, the greatest as not exempt from its control, and which has accordingly been incorporated into the domestic code of every nation. ”

“ For as civil law, being the act of the whole body politic, doth overrule each several part of the same body, so there is no reason that any one commonwealth of itself should, to the prejudice of another, annihilate that whereupon the whole world has agreed.”
It is acknowledged by every one, in the language of Mr. Hallam, one of the latest and ablest of the numerous writers who have discussed the merits of the treatise of Grotius on the Right of War and Peace, that the publication of this work marked an epoch in the philosophical, and it may be said, in the political history of Europe. ”

“ Grotius might have gone a step further, and might have said that this common consent of mankind was the voice of God declaring his will through the common conscience of the human race. It is thus indeed that many things which upon a priori reasoning might be justified by the Law of Nature as strictly deducible from admitted first principles, are condemned before the tribunal of the human conscience ”

“ The strength and virtue of that law is such that no particular nation can prejudice the same by any their several laws and ordinances, more than a man by his private resolutions the laws of the whole commonwealth or state in which he liveth. ”

“ When a book is little read it is easily misrepresented; and Rousseau, in his Contrât Social, has not hesitated to insinuate that Grotius confounds the fact with the right, and the duties of nations with their practice.
In our own country there have not been wanting writers who have assailed his style, or objected to his method. Paley, in his Moral Philosophy, finds fault with Grotius for quoting the opinions of poets and orators, of historians and philosophers, as authorities from whom there is no appeal. ”

“ Hallam, and Dr. Whewell.
The Science of International Law, like the science of Political Economy, is a fabric of comparatively modern structure. Much, which bears upon the subject, is probably to be discovered in the writings of the scholastic jurists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but the true era from which we must date the foundation of the great science, which is conversant with questions of right that concern the fellowship of nations, is the latter portion of the fifteenth century, one of the most remarkable epochs in the annals of legal science. ”

“ The nature, however, of the subject, substantially demanded at the hands of the great master, that he should cite examples from the history of mankind to illustrate and support the application of the general principles of law and politics; on the other hand the principles of natural law are so interwoven with those of ethical science, that an entire separation of them was not very feasible, perhaps not altogether desirable. ”

“ Those who gaze on the perfect form in which their work results, know little of the painful stages which have been undergone in fitting together the disjected limbs of truth, just as mariners, who guide their vessels through dangerous shoals by well-known beacons, think little of the labours of those who have first explored and buoyed the channel, and who have set up the landmarks. ”

“ It is a satisfaction to be able to quote the deliberate judgment of so learned and so temperate a writer as Mr. Hallam in defence of a work, the defects of which have been magnified by writers too careless to make themselves acquainted with its merits, or strongly prejudiced, like Rousseau and other French writers, against the method of reasoning. ”

“ An imaginary line drawn from pole to pole was henceforth to serve as a boundary between the territorial acquisitions of the two nations, who claimed to appropriate to themselves not merely the vast continents and numerous islands of the Indian seas, but even the extensive surface of ocean which divided them from the known parts of the world, and likewise the races of people who might be found to inhabit them. ”

“ On such matters poets and orators are the most unexceptionable of all witnesses; for they address themselves to the general feelings and sympathies of mankind, and they are neither warped by system, nor perverted by sophistry. They can attain none of their objects,—they can neither please nor pursuade,—if they dwell on moral sentiments not in unison with those of their readers. ”

“ Another circumstance should not be overlooked,—that a school of divines, amongst whom Erasmus was conspicuous, had declared all war to be unlawful, with a similar object, perhaps, to that with which, when a rod has been twisted in one direction, men bend it forcibly in another, under the hope of making it become straight. ”

“ The opinion of Soto may be gathered from the excellent principle laid down in his treatise on justice and law, dedicated to Don Carlos, that there can be no difference between Christians and pagans, for the law of nations is equal to all nations. ”

“ Hallam is disposed to consider the treatise of Ayala as the first book that systematically reduced the practice of nations in the conduct of war to legitimate rules, Lampredi, a very competent judge, claims for his fellow-countryman Albericus Gentilis the honour of being entitled the father of the modern science of Public Law. ”

“ It is difficult for us, in the present age, to measure the degree of courage and noble principle which impelled these excellent monks to vindicate the rights of the oppressed against the authority of the Church, the ambition of the Crown, the avarice and pride of their countrymen, and the prejudices of their own Order. ”

“ Allusion has been already made to the influence of the Reformation upon the system of European jurisprudence. It had been the habit of publicists, antecedently to that event, to invoke the authority of canonists equally as of the old Roman jurisconsults; and whilst the entire brotherhood of European princes acknowledged one and the same spiritual chief, his authority was binding upon their consciences, and his interference on critical occasions was as necesary as it was acceptable. ”

“ Having entered warmly into the controversy between the Arminians and the Gomarists, he was involved in the misfortunes of the pensionary Barnevelt, and of the Arminian party; and the philosopher of Delft, after the execution of his political chief, was in 1619 condemned to perpetual imprisonment.
The horrors of the civil war which had desolated his country, brought home to his attention the cruelty and injustice of which, to use his own words, even barbarians might be ashamed. War was declared upon the slightest pretext, or without any pretext at all ”

“ Accordingly he contended that the rights of the Spaniards were based on what he termed the right of natural society, which entitled them to seek to establish and carry on an innocent trade with the Indians, the rejection of which on their part would justify a declaration of war against them, and might lead to the conquest of their country. ”

“ Protestant princes were not likely to respect it in practice. Accordingly, we find that Queen Elizabeth of England, when Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, remonstrated against the expedition of Francis Drake, replied that she did not understand why either her subjects, or those of any other European prince, should be debarred from traffic in the Indies; that as she did not acknowledge the Spaniards to have any title by donation of the Bishop of Rome, so she knew no right they had to any places other than those they were in actual possession of.— (Camden’s Annals, anno 1580.) ”

“ Their great value was, that they cast into a permanent type and placed on record the usage of nations in certain matters, and brought mankind to respect that general usage as constituting a rule to which individuals, without respect to nationalities, were required to conform. They practically prepared the way for the admission of the legal doctrine which Hooker had foreshadowed in the first book of his Ecclesiastical Polity. ”