bottom of all there will be the hard sense of necessity. Whole nations will be in the field; the commerce of the world may be on the sea to win or lose; national existences will be at stake; men will be tempted to do anything which will shorten hostilities and tend to a decisive issue. Conduct in the next great war will certainly be hard; it is very doubtful if it will be scrupulous, either on the part of belligerents or neutrals, and most likely the next war will be great. But there can be very little doubt that if the next war is unscrupulously waged, it will also be followed by a reaction towards increased stringency of law. In a community, as in an individual, passionate excess is followed by a reaction of lassitude and, to some extent, of conscience.

"At any rate, it is a matter of experience that times in which international law has been seriously disregarded have been followed by periods in which the European conscience has done penance by putting itself under straighter obligations than which it before acknowledged. . . . I therefore look forward with much misgiving as to the manner in which the next great war will be waged, but with no misgiving at all as to the character of the rules which will be acknowledged ten years after its termination, by comparison with the rules now considered to exist."

The war which the learned author had in mind has come; and for a year has been waged on and under and over land and sea.

It is not my purpose to pass upon the question of how far Mr. Hall's premonitions of lawlessness, of unscrupulousness, of passionate excess, may already have been realized. Nor is it my purpose to consider what are the rights or the duties of the government of our country in connection with the things which any party to the war may have done or may do. I have perfect confidence-a confidence, I venture to say, which is shared by all-that, so long as President Wilson is at the helm, whatever it is right that our government should do will be done, and done calmly, considerately and courageously.

My purpose is to consider certain rules of war, their origin and development; some suggestions for their alterations made at The Hague conferences; the attitude towards these suggestions of the great powers, especially of the United States, Great Britain and Germany; and the actual working in the present war of these rules and of extensions and modifications of them; and from this consideration to

see whether we, too, like Mr. Hall, can look forward without misgiving to the rules which will be acknowledged ten years after the war.

But first we must know what sort of rules we want. We must choose a principle by which to test whether the rules are good or bad. Until we do, every new condition reopens in our minds questions we had supposed settled; we think the same rule good today and bad tomorrow; we are for it in peace and against it in war; and, as we are belligerents or neutrals, ask that it be enforced rigorously or loosely. Such a principle we get by accepting one or the other of two theories of what the immediate object of war should be. One theory is that "the only legitimate object of warfare is the weakening of the military forces of the enemy;" the other that the object should be to "strike the whole belligerent community, not merely the armies and navies in the field." What the latter theory means will be understood, and not easily forgotten, by whoever reads this sentence of Captain Mahan's:

"The destruction of the Confederacy's intercourse with the outer world, like some deep-seated local disease, poisoned the springs of life, spreading remorselessly through innumerable hidden channels into every part of the political frame, till the whole was sick unto death."

Captain Mahan and Andrew D. White, two of our delegates at the first Hague Conference, each found in the other an advocate of the principle to which he was opposed. Captain Mahan was a profound student of the history of sea power; an authority on it recognized the world over; a writer clear and vigorous; and a man of the highest character. He was proud of the profession of arms. To him there is in it "something which has made the soldier to all ages the type of heroism and self-denial." "It is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual life goes for its most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspirations."

In the diary which Dr. White kept during the Conference, he says of his colleague that "as an old naval officer wedded to the views generally entertained by the elder members of the naval and military service, he had very little

sympathy with the main purpose of the Conference;" and again, "when he speaks the millenium fades and this stern, severe, actual world appears." But Captain Mahan was far from being a man who saw only the present. His eyes seemed rather to be fixed on distant times; the actual world was to him only a point whither with great effort the best of past civilizations has been brought and whence the best of our civilization is to be carried on through threatening dangers to the future. We are, as he believed, at the opening of a period when the question is to be settled whether Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate the earth. "The great task now before the world of civilized Christianity is to receive into its own bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered-the civilizations at the head of which stand China, India and Japan." If the West is to go down in a conflict with the East, it is our task to see that defeat does not come until after the spiritual element in our civilization had found "room and time to germinate" in that which overthrows it. As it is due to the work of Caesar in the words of Mommsen-"that there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history," so, if a further span is to connect the glory of our civilization with the history of the future, the building of it must be due to the work of the soldier of today. A nation which is giving its attention solely to internal and commercial questions is "eating out its heart in merely internal political strife"-a strife from which Captain Mahan turned to the training of the millions of soldiers of Europe with the same relief as Mommsen felt when he looked from the "miserable monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the Senate House and in the streets of Rome" to Caesar gaining "for the Hellenic Italian culture the interval necessary to civlize the West." "In the providence of God," Captain Mahan declares in A Twentieth-Century Outlook, "along with the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and

mental luxury, brought by this century, there has grown up that counterpoise stigmatized as 'militarism' which has converted Europe into a great camp of soldiers prepared for war."

With this belief that a contest between civilizations was impending, talk of disarmament was to him "illtimed." The suggestion that the civilization in the superiority of which he was a firm believer should throw away any advantage it had in power, in skill, in education, or in inventiveness, seemed like turning the serious work of life into a game. When in one of the committees of the Conference his vote alone stood in the way of an unanimous prohibition of the use of asphyxiating gases and he was entreated to withdraw his opposition, he refused because his action was "a matter of principle."

His instructions as a delegate from the United States were to favor the immunity of private property of belligerents at sea. He refused to sign any arguments or reports which would indicate that he personally favored such immunity, for he was entirely opposed to it; how far is shown by his essay on the "Question of Immunity for Belligerent Merchant Shipping:"

"If the states represented at The Hague would adopt a code of neutrality forbidding any enlargement of neutral tonnage, in the carriage for a belligerent, over that practiced in peace; if they should agree concerning blockade-running that not only are ship and cargo open to condemnation, but the crew to imprisonment, as engaged in belligerent service; if they would forbid the extension of loans by neutral capitalists to governments actually at war; if, even, they would re-establish the rule that an enemy's property in a neutral ship is a lawful prize, they would do a much better stroke for the world's peace than by granting immunity to the commerce of a belligerent, which is the proposition before us. So far from an amelioration, this is an incentive to war by removing one of its evils, and that an evil which strikes the whole belligerent community, not merely the navies and armies in the field."

Captain Mahan's fellow-delegate, Andrew D. White, was our ambassador at Berlin and had been president of Cornell University and our minister at St. Petersburg. He was known to the universities here and abroad; he was familiar with the best thought of the world on many sub

jects; he had mingled with men in America and in Europe of all ranks and stations in life. His answer to the arguments of Captain Mahan is simple. It is given in his diary, where he speaks of Captain Mahan's opposition to the immunity of private property at sea.

"His is the natural view of a sailor, but the argument by which he supports it does not at all convince me. It is that during war we should do everything possible to weaken and worry the adversary, in order that he may the sooner be ready for peace. But this argument proves too much, since it would oblige us, if logically carried out, to go back to the marauding and atrocities of the Thirty Years War."

Between the principles of Captain Mahan and of President White we must decide. In choosing the rules of law which I have thought it worth while to examine today, I have had in mind that our consideration of them would' help to a choice of principle. Those rules relate to contraband, blockade, continuous voyage, the destruction of merchant vessels, the use of air machines for hurling bombs, and the use of asphyxiating gases.

Before the Crimean War England had always claimed the right to capture enemy goods on neutral ships; and France the right to capture neutral goods on enemy ships. Both nations during the war, in accordance with an announcement at the opening of it, refrained from exercising those rights and also refrained from privateering.

At the close of the war in 1856, the powers who were parties to the treaty of peace signed the Declaration of Paris, which provided

1. Privateering is and remains abolished.

2. The neutral flag covers enemy's goods with the exception of contraband of war.

3. Neutral goods, with the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under enemy's flag.

4. Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective; that is to say, maintained by forces sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.

Shortly after the declaration had been adopted France