The relation between penal jurisprudence and private ethics must be clarified. Both are concerned with the production of happiness. A man's private ethics are concerned with his duty to himself and to his neighbour; prudence, probity, and beneficence. Those cases described as unmeet for punishment are all within the ethical, but outside the legislative, sphere, except the "groundless" cases, which are outside both. The special field of private ethics is among the cases where punishment is "unprofitable" or "inefficacious," notably those which are the concern of prudence. So with the rules of beneficence; but beneficence might well be made compulsory in a greater degree than it is. The special sphere of legislation, however, lies in the field of probity.
A work of jurisprudence is either expository of what the law is, or censorial, showing what it should be. It may relate to either local or universal jurisprudence; but if expository can hardly be more than local. It may be internal, or international, though there is very little law in international procedure; if internal, it may be national or provincial, it may be historical or living; it may be divided into statutory and customary, into civil and penal or criminal.
JEAN BLOCH
The son of humble Polish Jews, Jean Bloch, who was born in 1836, amassed a large fortune out of Russian railways. At the age of fifty he retired from business, and devoted himself to an exhaustive study of the conditions and possibilities of modern warfare. To this labour he gave eight years, and, in 1898, the fruits of it were published in a work of six volumes, in which he sought to prove that, owing to the immensity of modern armies, the deadliness of modern weapons, and the economic conditions that prevailed in the larger states, a great European war was rapidly becoming a physical impossibility. M. Bloch died on January 7, 1902, not before several of his theories had been tested by actual campaigning. His main argument, however, concerns a war on European frontiers between European powers, and such a war he did not live to witness.
I.—The Problem Stated
In the public and private life of modern Europe a presentiment is felt that the present incessant growth of armaments must either call forth a war, ruinous both for conqueror and for conquered, and ending perhaps in general anarchy; or must reduce the people to the most lamentable condition. Is this unique state of mind justified by possible contingencies?