Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

But while many nations within their own borders were able to establish peaceful relations between their citizens by means of law and order, the relationship between the nations themselves could not be regulated in the same way. In their infancy the nations recognized no law, no regulations for warfare, and no binding sense of obligation. There was no supreme authority who could insist on obedience, and the only way of settling differences was to fight it out. Agreements between one ruler and another were of little value; terrible barbarities and wholesale massacre were resorted to without protest; no sort of code of honor or humanity was recognized, and justification for hideous cruelty was often found by the Church in the pages of the Bible.

At a period when Europe was one broad battlefield, when wars were raging between races, between nations, and between religious sects, and hatred, misery, cruelty, and torture were filling the world with horror, and in a country that was suffering more than any other from these fearful evils, was born a man who, in spite of the darkness around him and in spite of the overwhelming forces which seemed to be subduing mankind, set to work to save civilization from ruin and to establish law and reason in the relations of nations. This man was Huig de Groot, known afterwards to the world as Hugo Grotius, who was born at Delft, in Holland, on Easter Day of 1583. He will be recognized for all time as the founder of international law, and as the first man who awakened the conscience of governments to a higher moral sense, to more humanitarian feelings, and to the recognition of the fact that there was such a thing as international duty. “I saw,” he said, “in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reverence of law, Divine or human. A declaration of war seemed to let loose every crime.”

The foundation of his idea was that the Law of Nations, that is to say, the agreements made between governments, should be brought into harmony with the principles of natural morality and the commands of justice written, as he said, by God on the hearts and minds of men. This he called the Law of Nature, which man could discover by right reason. He wanted, in fact, the same ideas of right and wrong which people were taught to adopt in their dealings with one another to be applied to the dealings of one nation with another. Instead of saying that justice, honor, generosity, and friendship meant one thing between man and man and quite another thing between nation and nation, he tried to combine the two and bring the lower one up to the level of the higher. Out of this union between the two sorts of law he hoped to create an international law which would put an end to the unreasonable, uncivilized, and perpetually dangerous relationship which existed between nations.

The great book he wrote was called “De Jure Belli ac Pacis” (Concerning the Law of War and Peace). He collected together in it quotations from a number of great men, and elaborated his argument with wonderful clearness and great learning. He condemned the atrocities of warfare, and more especially he pointed to a way in which war might be avoided. He examined various methods by which international questions might be settled without war, and proposed the idea of conferences and international arbitration. In fact, it may be said that the seed of arbitration was first sown when Grotius wrote the words: “But specially are Christian kings and States bound to try this way of avoiding war.” The book, indeed, in the hands of those who followed him, became a mighty weapon against the follies of rulers and the cruelties of war. It could not have been written by a mere scholar; it was not just a collection of quotations and clever theories; it was the work of a man whose nobility of heart and mind and whose earnestness and unselfishness made his voice echo through the nations and through the ages.

But you, who have known a war compared to which the wars of the past seem as little battles, may well ask whether the ideas of Grotius have really spread and become of any permanent good. Well, I will try to answer that question. The tremendous scale of the great European war of the twentieth century is not a measure of the wicked disposition of the nations concerned, but is due more especially to the easy methods of transport and communication, to the rapid manner in which munitions can be manufactured, and to the diabolical nature of modern inventions and engines of destruction. That war could not be prevented is not due to the frantic desire of the peoples to fight, but to the policy of governments and ministers, to the faulty methods of intercourse between nations, which is called diplomacy, and to the inability of the people to control their governments. So far from this catastrophe showing nations are more evilly disposed towards one another than formerly, it is undoubtedly true that mutual knowledge was beginning to produce a new sympathy and understanding, and though it has been checked, that movement will revive and continue, perhaps with greater vigor.

Although there may be much to alter and much to mend in ways that Grotius never dreamed of, the prospect of the cessation of war is decidedly nearer, in spite of this great failure. Such a prospect may still be very remote—we cannot say—but it is as inevitable as the rising of the sun, and we can either help or hinder its coming. Therefore, in considering the fact that the mind of man has been slowly preparing for the abolition of the rule of force and the establishment of the reign of reason, and that moral law has been slowly but surely gaining ground over belief in violence, we should ever turn with gratitude to the man who took the first and most difficult step, and who had sufficient foresight and courage, when things seemed most hopeless, to look into the future.

The publication of such a book naturally caused a great stir. It came out in 1625, and was immediately placed by the Pope upon the Index—that is, the list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read. It was not a popular book in the sense that it could be read by every one. The appeal was to thinking men. Its influence therefore was very gradual. But slowly the ideas set forth by Grotius found their way into laws and into treaties, and eminent lawyers in European universities took the great work as a starting-point of the further development of principles of international law. There are two interesting instances of how the influence of the book was immediately felt. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who was the greatest general of the time, made a careful study of “De Jure Belli ac Pacis”: he kept it by his bedside, and it was found in his tent after his death on the field of Lützen. Gustavus constantly stood for mercy, and began on a large scale the better conduct of modern war. He made speeches to his soldiers dissuading them from cruelty or rebuking them for it.

The other instance was in the case of the capture of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu, who governed France in the name of Louis XIII. La Rochelle was the stronghold of French Protestantism. All Europe expected that the inhabitants would be massacred, in accordance with the spirit of cruel intolerance which was usual at that time, and which would certainly be expected from the merciless Cardinal. But to the amazement of the world there were no massacre, no destruction, and no plunder, and the Huguenots were treated with mercy and even respect. At a later period, indeed, Cardinal Richelieu freed the writings of Grotius from the French censorship, and declared him one of the three great scholars of his time.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which closed the Thirty Years War in 1648, may be added as another instance of how Grotius had brought in a new epoch in international affairs, for it contained principles which he had been the first to bring into the thought of the world. Nevertheless, the immediate influence of Grotius’ book was not so great as the lasting service he rendered in laying the foundation of a new science of International Law, on which succeeding generations slowly built up and strengthened the sense of morality between nations. There is still very much to be added; and new problems and new conditions require new plans and new designs. But the foundation was well laid and can never be shifted.

The book was criticized by some who declared that it was just a shapeless collection of quotations, and that the argument was lost under the mass of extracts from other authorities. It is true that its arrangement and style were rather heavy and clumsy, and there is much in the book that may appear to us, three hundred years afterwards, as rather crude, but attack has come for the most part from those who are quite unable to understand the high ideal toward which Grotius was reaching out. A prominent English international jurist, Sir James Mackintosh, has declared that this great work “is perhaps the most complete that the world has yet owed, at so early a stage in the progress of any science, to the genius and learning of one man.”