294 SYMPOSIUM ON INTERNATIONAL LAW. 



The fact is not today generally appreciated that the fundamental 

 guarantees of personal liberty were set aside in the United States 

 during the Civil War, and that the people lived under a military 

 dictatorship. A benevolent dictatorship it may have been and no 

 doubt generally was, but it was nevertheless a dictatorship. When, 

 soon after the outbreak of the war, a citizen of the state of Mary- 

 land, which had not seceded from the Union, sought to avail himself 

 of the writ of habeas corpus, the marshal of the court w^ho sought 

 to serve the writ was informed by the military officer who held the 

 prisoner in custody that he took his orders not from the courts but 

 from the War Department at Washington. The meaning of this 

 was that the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty were 

 suspended ; and grave statesmen went so far as to announce that 

 they approved the course of the administration just in proportion as 

 it disregarded the law. There were many persons at the time who 

 thought that the constitution of the United States had come to an 

 end, just as many persons are now saying that international law has 

 come to an end. The difficulty with such persons is that they look 

 for law between firing lines, and regard a temporary phase as a 

 permanent condition. 



I do not hesitate to affirm that the violations of international law 

 during the present conflict in Europe, fierce and wide extended as it 

 is, have not exceeded, either in number or in importance, those that 

 occurred during the wars growing out of the French Revolution 

 and the succeeding Napoleonic Wars. In reality, many recent viola- 

 tions, which are commonly supposed to be new, have precise prece- 

 dents or analogies in what took place in the former titanic struggle, 

 in which there were extensions of the contraband list and interfer- 

 ences with commerce under pretences of blockade, just as there have 

 been during the present great struggle. These things are done, not 

 because of any uncertainty as to the law, but because the parties to 

 the war, being engaged in a life and death contention by force, 

 naturally think more of their own safety than of the interests of 

 neutral nations. 



Nor is there in these things any reason for discouragement as to 

 the future of international law. As the ordinary rules of inter- 

 course have in all previous conflicts been more or less disregarded, 



