This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted, the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than something already attained.
Progress in war ethics: Hugo Grotius
But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In no period of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have been lost.
This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound, a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius[775]—a work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever written not claiming divine inspiration.”[776] The aim of Grotius was not to abolish war,—he did not think universal peace an attainable ideal,—but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities, to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding. The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.[777] As the Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform of the laws of war.[778]
The influence of the work of Grotius was profound and widespread. From the time of its appearance dates a new departure in the humanization of war, and a fresh moral advance in international law.[779] “His ideas,” says Dr. Andrew D. White, “found their way into current discussion, into systems of law, into treaties; and as generations rolled by, the world began to find itself, it hardly knew how, less and less cruel, until men looked back on war as practiced in his time as upon a hideous dream—doubtless much as men in future generations will look back upon the wars of our times.”[780]
The humane provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the establishment of the Red Cross Society, which on the field of battle cares without discrimination for the stricken, are inspiring illustrations of the growth of this new humanitarianism.
Movement for the abolition of war— a moral issue
Now this growing sensitiveness of the public conscience which has effected so many mitigations of the barbarities of war has resulted in a widespread and insistent demand that war between civilized nations shall not merely be humanized but that it shall be abolished, that disputes between nations shall be settled as disputes between individuals are settled—by courts of justice.
Without doubt many influences, political, social, and economic,[781] have concurred in creating this great world-wide movement, and in calling into existence the Hague Conferences and the international and national peace congresses of the last decade or two; but among all these forces and motives the one of greatest potency is the awakened and instructed conscience of the world in regard to the criminality of war as an established and legalized method of settling controversies between civilized nations. It is this new conscience and not the new dreadnought to which we must look to abolish war and to keep it abolished. For, like the question of slavery two generations ago, this question of war has become a moral issue, and, like the slavery question, it will give the world no rest until settled in accordance with the demands of the new conscience.
War an abrogation of the ordinary moral code