Political and Legal Remedies for War

lanthropist, he is only concerned with War as a means, however violent and irregular, for the support of legal rights, or with the restrictions which civilization has introduced into the exercise of what are sometimes called the extreme rights of War. He is called upon only to register and expound the practical rules based upon the tacit or express consent of nations, and conformable to the dictates of abstract justice, so far as these can be ascertained; and he is not entitled to impair the simple treatment of a subject, engrossing enough in itself, by speculations on a remote future, or even by benevolently suggested reforms for the immediate present. Not, indeed, that the writers of text-books on International

Law have generally exercised the self-restraint here sufficiently commended. On the contrary, they have all but

universally assumed the character of legislators as well as lawyers.

Nor have they even confined themselves to the

Its limits pot

observed.

moderate course of hinting at what, in their opinion, the law ought to be, while explaining what it actually is. Their views of what the law is have been largely colored by what they have wished the law to be, and, too often, by what they have conceived the interests of their own States demanded it should be. Some writers, indeed, by publishing Codes of International Law, have combined inextricably together the treatment of the law as it is, and that of the law as, in their opinion, it ought to be. They have given definiteness and precision to principles which are, as yet, of most fluctuating authority, and are only creeping on toward general recognition. They have imparted clearness and simplicity to rules the true import and circumscription of which can only be understood by laying side by side a long series of treaties, despatches, judicial decisions, and desultory utterances of eminent statesmen. They have everywhere substituted order for disorder, the rule of right for that of might, and the claims of humanity for the traditional assumptions of egotistic self-interest. But, though the motives of these philanthropic legislators have

been of the noblest, and the results of their efforts, Uncertainty of

no doubt, widely beneficent, their method has been

one of the causes which has discredited International Law as a system of actually binding rules. It has come about that neither the subject of the law as it is, nor that of the law as it ought to be made, has been adequately treated; and, when those who professed to be teachers of the law acknowledged themselves uncertain as to the existence of any rules at all wholly out of the region of further debate, there might be an excuse for those who were interested in prolonging a period of uncertainty and confusion in declaring there was no law at all. The Laws relative to War afford a good illustration of these

remarks. There is no part of International Law course of forma- in which the rules are, almost from day to day, un

dergoing more rapid vacillations; and the proceedings of the Brussels Conference, in 1874, display at once the

rules of International Law.

Laws of War in.

tion.

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Political and Legal Remedies for War, Volume 20