regular military forces of the belligerents,

the armies and the navies. This military force cannot be a spontaneous uprising and coming together of the people to defend their native soil and to expel an invader; it must be a regular organization, its existence contemplated and provided for during time of peace, and must be under the immediate control of, and direct responsibility to, the head of the government. To this professional military force is entrusted the duty of conducting the actual hostilities and of deciding the issue, while all else in the nation are indifferent spectators; or, at least, while all else, all the private citizens, are left to pursue their usual trades and business with their legal condition unchanged. This is the theory of war which is most earnestly advocated by the writers of the humanitarian school without exception, and it is regarded by them as a conception which places the international law upon a purely ethical foundation. A very brief analysis will disclose its true character and inevitable effect.

The final object of the proposed reform, it constantly should be remembered, is to render war humane. This is not to be accomplished by any change in the most effective mode of overcoming resistance, the destruction of human life. The new method of warfare does not dispense with death and wounds and human suffering; it does not contemplate one less life lost, one less body maimed, one less wound inflicted. We state it in the most emphatic manner, and challenge any contradiction, or possibility of contradiction, that if all these so-called reforms in the laws of war should be universally accepted by the civilized world, they would not necessarily produce, nor tend to produce, the slightest mitigation in the aggregate of human suffering resulting from the regular and lawful endeavors to destroy life which are the crowning act of all warfare. If there be any such mitigation in fact, and undoubtedly there has been, it is caused not by changes in the legal status of belligerent citizens, but by the wonderful improvement in the destructiveness of weapons, and by the introduction and enforce

1 Among the many writers who maintain this theory, the following are a few of the most recent and most prominent: Massé, Le Droit Commercial dans ses Rapports avec le Droit des Gens., tom. i. c. 2, §§ 121, 122; Eugène Cauchy, Le Droit Maritime International, tom. i. pp. 20, 49, 50, 287-239; ii. 15, 16, 289–291, 293, 467-470, 472– 478; Bluntschli, Le Droit International Codifié, articles 510-512, 529-535; Field, Outlines of an International Code, articles 704, 705, and note to last article.

ment of strict sanitary regulations, and by the active labors of voluntary and ancillary associations for the care of the wounded.1 In what, then, consists the alteration wrought by the reformed mode of conducting hostilities? It is simply the following: It would, in the first place, remove the direct suffering from one class of citizens and lay it all upon another class; and would, in the second place, abandon the coercive means which consists in the capture and destruction of property, and would substitute in the place thereof, as the only means of enforcing submission, the destruction of human life. The humanity which is extolled by this modern school of publicists, when stripped of the verbiage which surrounds it in their writings, and reduced to its naked proportions, is exercised solely in favor of that class of citizens of a belligerent nation who are non-combatant; their homes cannot be disturbed, their property cannot be taken, their commercial pursuits cannot be interrupted, their methods and operations of acquiring gain or of procuring pleasure must go on unaffected by the storm of war which rages around them. While they are thus protected, and warfare, as it respects them, is made humane, this result is plainly accomplished at the expense of the other class of citizens, who are denominated combatants. In fact, the humanitarian theorists, through all their speculations, seem to forget that armies, as well as the ranks of traders, mechanics, farmers, and merchants, are composed of men, and seem to regard the soldiers as machines capable of no suffering, and having no interests to be guarded in comparison with those of non-combatants. Just so far as a belligerent nation surrenders up the means of coercing the enemy and bringing it to terms by capturing the property of private citizens and destroying their commerce, must it resort to some other means

1 The Sanitary Commission, which was organized in aid of the national armies during the late civil war in this country, and the Society of the Geneva Cross, which has been established permanently in Europe, and has even been protected expressly by special conventions, plainly show what can practically be done to mitigate the horrors of war. These movements are truly humanitarian, and nothing in the present article should be understood as reflecting in the slightest degree upon these and similar noble enterprises. Every thing which can be done to lessen the evils of actual warfare should meet the most hearty approval, both of the publicist and of the statesman, and the labors of such societies show what a wonderful advance has been made in public opinion within the present generation. The object of this article is to show the spurious nature of that humanitarianism which would protect property and trade during war at the necessary expense of human life and human suffering.

of coercion in order to reach the same end, and the only other method possible is to destroy more lives, to inflict more wounds; in short, to put more persons hors de combat. This so-called humane scheme of conducting warfare, with its confinement of all actual hostilities to the conflicts between a professional soldiery, and its abandonment of all modes of crippling the opposing national forces by direct interference with commercial activities, inevitably requires, therefore, a corresponding increase of the armies on both sides; and this demand can only be supplied by a larger draft upon the able-bodied men who are the actual producers of the two countries. In every contest between two nations the amount of resistance - that is, the total resisting power drawn from all sources-possessed by each must properly be regarded as a constant quantity; in other words, each can, by combining all its resources, oppose a certain, determinate, and fixed amount of resistance to the attacks of the enemy. Apply the theory of war to one of these states, and the results will be true in all possible cases. The object of all actual hostilities is to overcome this resistance and thus to compel submission to the demands of the successful party. As wars have hitherto been conducted, this resistance may be overcome by the use of two very different forces, both of which directly tend to drive the public mind, and through it the government, into an attitude of submission. The first of these forces, which may be represented by an algebraic symbol, a, consists in attacks upon the organized military arm of the enemy, the portion of its citizens which are termed combatants, and its efficacy lies in the destruction of life and the infliction of bodily suffering. The second force, which we may represent by b, is directed against the non-combatant portion of the citizens, and consists chiefly in a destruction of their wealth by the capture of property and the derangement and temporary stoppage of business avocations. These two factors, a and b, taken together must equal the amount of the resistance to be overcome; and when thus combined their product also is a constant fixed quantity. Now, it is plain that if one of these factors be lessened the other must be augmented, if the resultant is to remain the same. When the force b is diminished, the force a must be increased proportionately if the constant of resistance is to be overcome; and if, finally, force b disappears entirely, force a must be augmented so that it shall equal the former com

bined effect of a and b together. This reasoning is demonstrative. The humanity of the new theory of war, so far as it is productive of any good, is confined to the single class of noncombatant citizens, and what it gains for them is gained at the expense of the other class, whose rights are, in the contemplation of an ideal morality, equally valuable and equally entitled to protection. This humanity is, moreover, exercised in the preservation of mere material wealth belonging to the favored class of non-combatants, while the lives of the combatants are surrendered up as an equivalent for the property thus preserved. Again, in removing commerce and the property of private citizens from the danger of hostile interference and attack, the most powerful of all possible checks upon a people's entering into war will be given up. At the present day war has come to be principally a matter of money. The expense of raising, equipping, and maintaining the armies which must now be brought into the field, and of supplying the necessary military armaments on land and on the sea, has enormously increased. The fiscal burden laid upon a government and a people in preparing for and carrying on hostilities is so excessive, that no government will engage in war unless it is sustained both by the general public opinion of the country and by the opinion and pecuniary aid of its capitalists and traders. The result is, that the great commercial and business classes in every state must practically determine whether their government shall go to the length of actual war: they hold the check; they will count the cost, and their conclusions will inevitably be shaped by their opinion as to the pecuniary advantage derived or loss sustained. As long as their commerce is exposed to interruption and possible destruction by the enemy, the motive must be very powerful which will impel these trading classes to incur the hazards of such loss by consenting to a declaration of war. If to the public burdens caused by increased taxation, and the financial derangement resulting from the withdrawal of large numbers of able-bodied men from the ranks of producers in order to fill up the armies, there be added the probable loss of foreign commerce and the cessation of all business activities depending upon it, the capitalists, the merchants, the traders, and the manufacturers, who must supply the government with the necessary means by loans, and who must also bear the personal burden of crippled, and perhaps ruined,

business, will naturally oppose a steady resistance to all wars carried on for any other object than the national honor. The position of Great Britain during the past thirty year illustrates this statement and proves its correctness. It is now proposed to remove this most salutary check upon governmental and national ambition, desire of conquest, and all other motives which may urge a people into unnecessary hostilities. The new theory, by permitting the business pursuits to go on unaffected and undisturbed, relieves the great trading and commercial classes from all hazard of loss, and thus, to a great extent, takes away the principal ground of their opposition to belligerent measures. Wars will thus be rendered easier. Such a result would certainly not be in the interests of humanity.

The sketch thus given is a sufficient description of the school of jurists and publicists who are the prominent advocates of the proposed reforms in the laws which control the conduct of warfare; and it partially explains why they are found supporting measures which from one point of view appear to be the result of antagonistic principles. With these theoretical writers the fact that one of these modifications is in the interest of commerce, and that another is diametrically opposed to this tendency, and places limits upon a traffic now permitted by the law, is not of the slightest consequence. They do not accept nor reject a legal doctrine on account of its possible effect upon the material prosperity of peoples; if in their opinion it is logically deduced from some general principle of abstract right, and especially if they discover in it a conformity with their conceptions of humanity, it finds a place in their system, no matter what may be its effect upon the development of states, upon their trade and commerce, their productions and their modes of government and internal organization. In the advocacy of these alterations to be made in the law of war, the professional jurists and publicists of the school thus described are greatly aided by another class of persons who have no special knowledge of jurisprudence, but who are nevertheless at the present time devoting all their energies and zeal to its amendment, I mean the professional philanthropists. Ignorant of the first principles of public law, unable to conceive of its scientific character as a whole, or of the dependent relations of its parts, they have been attracted by the humanitarian claims put forth by the writers to whom allusion