avoided amongst men that live together." * A constant dread of attack and a growing consciousness of the necessity of presenting a united front against it result in the choice of some leader-the head of a family perhaps—who acts, it may be, only as captain of the hosts, as did Joshua in Israel, or who may discharge the simple duties of a primitive governor or king. † Peace within is found to be strength without. The civil state is established, so that "if there needs must be war, it may not yet

* Cf. Republic, II. 369. "A state," says Socrates, "arises out of the needs of mankind: no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants."

† See Hume's account of the origin of government (Treatise, III., Part II., Sect. VIII.). There are, he says, American tribes "where men live in concord and amity among themselves without any established government; and never pay submission to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their captain enjoys a shadow of authority, which he loses after their return from the field, and the establishment of peace with the neighbouring tribes. This authority, however, instructs them in the advantages of government, and teaches them to have recourse to it, when either by the pillage of war, by commerce, or by any fortuitous inventions, their riches and possessions have become so considerable as to make them forget, on every emergence, the interest they have in the preservation of peace and justice...... Camps are the true mothers of cities; and as war cannot be administered, by reason of the suddenness of every exigency, without some authority in a single person, the same kind of authority naturally takes place in that civil government, which succeeds the military." Cf. Cowper: The Winter Morning Walk:

and ere long,

When man was multiplied and spread abroad

In tribes and clans, and had begun to call
These meadows and that range of hills his own,

Translator's Introduction

7

nation's territory, lay the land of a deadly foe. This was the way of thinking, even of so highly cultured a people as the Greeks, who believed that a law of nature had made every outsider, every barbarian their inferior and their enemy. * Their treaties of peace, at the time of the Persian War, were frankly of the kind denounced by Kant, mere armistices concluded for the purpose of renewing their fighting strength. The ancient world is a world of perpetual war in which defeat meant annihilation. In the East no right was recognised in the enemy; and even in Greece and Rome the fate of the unarmed was death or slavery. † The

Similarly we find that the original meaning of the Latin word "hostis" was "a stranger."

In Aristotle we find the high-water mark of Greek thinking on this subject. "The object of military training," says he, (Politics, Bk. IV. Ch. XIV., Welldon's translation-in older editions Bk. VII.) "should be not to enslave persons who do not deserve slavery, but firstly to secure ourselves against becoming the slaves of others; secondly, to seek imperial power not with a view to a universal despotic authority, but for the benefit of the subjects whom we rule, and thirdly, to exercise despotic power over those who are deserving to be slaves. That the legislator should rather make it his object so to order his legislation upon military and other matters as to promote leisure and peace is a theory borne out by the facts of history." (loc. cit. Ch. XV.). War, as we have remarked several times, has its end in peace." Aristotle strongly condemns the Lacedæmonians and Cretans for regarding war and conquest as the sole ends to which all law and education should be directed. Also in non-Greek tribes like the Scythians, Persians, Thracians and Celts he says, only military

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rights in fact of any kind. Among the Romans things were little better. According to Mr. T. J. Lawrence -see his Principles of International Law, III., §§ 21, 22-they were worse. For Rome stood alone in the world: she was bound by ties of kinship to no other state. She was, in other words, free from a sense of obligation to other races. War, according to Roman ideas, was made by the gods, apart altogether from the quarrels of rulers or races. To disobey the sacred command, expressed in signs and auguries would have been to hold in disrespect the law and religion of the land. When, in the hour of victory, the Romans refrained from pressing their rights against the conquered-rights recognised by all Roman jurists— it was from no spirit of leniency, but in the pursuit of a prudent and far-sighted policy, aiming at the growth of Roman supremacy and the establishment of a world-embracing empire, shutting out all war as it blotted out natural boundaries, reducing all rights to the one right of imperial citizenship. There was no real jus belli, even here in the cradle of international law; the only limits to the fury of war were of a religious character. The treatment of a defeated enemy among the Jews rested upon a similar religious foundation. In the East, we find a special cruelty in the conduct of war. The wars of the Jews and Assyrians were