346 AN INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL FOR EUROPE. 



established institutions, and the practices of the people, regulated, 

 though they may have been, by certain principles, yet they were, 

 nevertheless, an appeal to force, as violence decided their disputes. 

 It was during that dark period of those mediseval and barbarous 

 times, that Grotius, a brave man, a genius, and an authority on 

 International Law, was so impressed with this unbridled lust for miU- 

 tary ambition and territorial aggrandizement, which animated and 

 controlled the age in which he lived, that he published to the world 

 the first Treatise on International Law, entitled, " De Jure Belli, ac 

 Pads" and, it may be well to quote, from the Preface to that remark- 

 able work, the reasons he so forcibly gave for writing it. He said : — 



"I observed, throughout the Christian world, a licentiousness in regard to war, 

 which even barbarous nations ought to be ashamed of, a running to arms upon 

 erery frivolous, or rather, no occasion, which, being once taken up, there remained 

 no longer any reverence for right, either divine or human, just as if, from that 

 time, men were authorised, and firmly resolved, to commit all manner of crimes 

 without restraint." 



And, may we not declare, that, at the present time, in International 

 Affairs, whilst, it may be admitted, that there are certain maxims and 

 principles, with a certain amount of equity and morality, yet, that it is 

 brute force, or, as Grotius declared, 200 years ago, " An appeal to 

 violence, a running to arms on every frivolous occasion," that 

 decides national quarrels ; so that we may say, even from the days of 

 Julius Caesar down to the present time, during the 2,000 years of 

 the Christian Era, with all their accumulated experiences of Christian 

 thought and Christian teaching, nations have ever taken the law 

 into their own hands, by the blind and brutal arbitrament of war, 

 thus endeavouring, by force, to secure what they call justice. 



Whilst, therefore, this absence of law, and of a Judicial Tribunal 

 of Arbitration, may have been permitted in a state of Society, and 

 amongst nations, slowly emerging from semi-barbarism, yet now that 

 nations have become more civilised, more under the benign 

 influence of Christian thought and practice, and more dependent 

 upon one another, by Free Trade, by industrial and commercial 

 activity, and especially now that war, and the infernal machinery of 

 war, is, year by year, becoming more and more murderous, a system, 

 in fact, of murdering men by machinery, is it not becoming more 

 and more intolerable, that nations bound together by interests so 

 vast, so complicated, and yet so mutual, which Mr. Gladstone so 



