house of Bourbon to the crown of Spain upon condition that it should never be united to that of France. The treaties of Utrecht established this separation as one of the fundamental rules of European public law; whilst it severed Belgium, Milan, and Naples from the Spanish monarchy, and settled them upon the house of Austria. The conditions of the peace embraced a practical application of the principle of interference to preserve the balance of power, though the same results might have been obtained by executing the partition treaties without the enormous expense of blood and treasure caused by the Succession war. was objected to these treaties that they were framed with a single view to the security of Europe, and without reference to the consent of the Spanish nation, or to the welfare of the states thus parcelled out. But the danger against which the partition treaties were intended to guard was precisely the same which was afterwards made the ground of war; and a danger which, acccording to the opinion of the age, was sufficient to justify the war, could not but be decmed sufficient to justify the provisions intended to prevent it.

It

The peace of Utrecht once more sanctioned the legitimacy of the English revolution of 1688, and guaranteed the Protestant succession to the British crown in the house of Hanover, as it had been settled by act of parliament. The cause of the Stuarts was thus finally abandoned by France, and with it the principle of hereditary, indefeasible right on which it was founded. The treaties of Utrecht were constantly renewed and confirmed from this time forth in every successive treaty of peace between the great continental and maritime powers until the peace of Luneville, 1800, and that of Amiens, 1803, when they were for the first time omitted. The only material alteration, during all this period, in the territorial arrangements stipulated by this great compact was that provided by the treaty of Vienna, 1738, which transferred the crown of the two Sicilies to a branch of the house of Bourbon. In other respects the

§ 4. Public

latter half of

teenth centu

ry.

territorial arrangements of the south of Europe continued to rest until the French revolution, and still continue to rest upon the basis of the peace of Utrecht.k

The event of the thirty years war in Germany had jurists of the brought upon the European scene a power which had bethe seven- fore played but a secondary and subordinate part. Sweden was one of the new and foreign elements introduced into the federative system of Germany by the peace of Westphalia. The arms of Gustavus Adolphus had enabled the Protestant and anti-imperial party to dictate the terms of that peace; and the weight of Sweden was henceforth felt in the balance of Europe, as a mediating power, whose interests were connected with the rights of neutrality and the maintenance of the equilibrium she had contributed to establish. Her diplomats were public jurists, and her public jurists were diplomats. Grotius had been the ambassador of his adopted country at Paris. The son of Grotius was the Swedish ambassador in Holland, at the time when that republic, whose very existence was threatened by the mighty power of Louis XIV, excited the general interest of Europe in favour of a people who had redeemed their country from the ocean in order to make it one of the bulwarks of the independence of nations.

dorf, b. 1632. d. 1689.

Puffendorf, a native of Saxony, one of the publicists $5. Puffen- formed in the school of Grotius, was retained by the Swedish ambassador at the court of Copenhagen as the governor of his children. On the breaking out of the war in 1658 between Denmark and Sweden, when the Danish islands were invaded by Charles IX, Puffendorf was detained as a prisoner by the Danes with the other members of the ambassador's family. This practical infraction of the law of nations in his own person turned his thoughts to the foundations on which its obligation was supposed to rest; and he beguiled the tedium of an eight months im

* Mignet, Negotiations relatives à la Succession d'Espagne, tom. i. Introd. p. xcvii.

prisonment in meditating upon his past reading, not being allowed the aid of books. He thus digested from his recollections of Grotius and Hobbes a compilation which he afterwards published under the title of Elements of Universal Jurisprudence. In this little work he professes to follow the method of the geometers, laying down his definitions and axioms, and demonstrating his conclusions with a strict mathematical accuracy, which it is now generally acknowledged that moral reasonings do not allow. Still this treatise brought him into public notice among the patrons of the new science of Natural Jurisprudence then. so much in vogue. The Elector Palatine Charles Louis, to whom it was dedicated, called him to the chair of the Law of Nature and Nations which that enlightened prince had founded in the still renowned university of Heidelberg. In his public lectures, Puffendorf used the treatise of Grotius De Jure Belli ac Pacis as his text book; which according to his own account, convinced him of the want of a more exact and complete work on the science of Natural Jurisprudence. In reply to the advice of a minister of one of the German princes exhorting him to undertake such a work, Puffendorf answered that it "would require a penetrating intellect, an exquisite judgment free from all prejudice, a vast library, long leisure and correspondence with many learned men, all which things he lacked. Nevertheless he would undertake it." In 1670 he was offered, and accepted the professorship of jurisprudence established in the University of Lund by Charles XI, of Sweden. Two years subsequently he published his great work De Jure Naturæ et Gentium, which he abridged under the title De Officiis Hominis et Civis. These works were soon translated into the principal languages of Europe, widely diffused, studied, and commentated. A mighty importance was then attributed to the study of the writings of the publicists, which strongly contrasts with the almost total neglect into which they have now fallen. Even that judicious philosopher, Locke, in his treatise on education, says that

when the pupil has well digested Cicero's Offices, and the smaller work of Puffendorf on the Duties of Man and the Citizen, he should be made to read Grotius on the Laws of War and Peace, or what is perhaps a still better work, Puffendorf on the Law of Nature and Nations, in which he may instruct himself in the natural rights of man, the origin and foundations of society, and the duties which thence result.

In point of style, genius, and learning far inferior to Grotius, the work of Puffendorf, like that of his great predecessor, is strewed with a profusion of quotations from ancient authors, sacred and profane, which very often have little or no application to the matter in hand, and are not seldom misunderstood by the writer. Grotius had used the testimony of philosophers, historians, poets, and even of orators, in order to show the concurrence of many minds of different ages and countries in the same sentiment, from which he deduces that general consent which in his opinion constitutes the obligatory force of those rules which ought to regulate the intercourse between nations. We shall hereafter see that Puffendorf's theory of the nature and obligation of international law was widely different, and he' has therefore less excuse for conforming in this respect to what it must be confessed was the prevailing taste of the age. What La Bruyere says of those who are affected with this mania of quotation may well be applied to Puffendorf. 66 Herille, soit qu'il parle, qu'il harangue ou qu'il écrive, veut citer: il fait dire au prince des philosophes, que le vin enivre, et à l'orateur romain que l'eau le tempère. S'il se jette dans la morale, ce n'est pas lui, c'est le divin Platon qui assure, que la vertu est aimable; le vice odieux ; ou que l'unou l'autre se tournent en habitude; les choses les plus communes, les plus triviales, et qu'il est même capable de penser, il veut les devoir aux anciens, aux Latins, aux Grecs."1

1 La Bruyere, Caractères, tom. ii. ch. 12.

In order to determine how far the science of international law was advanced by the labours of Puffendorf it is necessary to examine in what state it was left by Grotius. That celebrated writer used the term natural law as comprehending those rules of justice which would govern the conduct of men, as moral and accountable beings, supposing them to live in a social state independently of positive human institutions, or as it is commonly expressed, living in a state of nature. "Natural law," says he, "is the dictate of right reason, pronouncing that there is in some actions a moral obligation, and in other actions a moral deformity, arising from their respective suitableness or repugnance to the rational, and social nature, and that consequently such actions are either forbidden or enjoined by God the author of nature. Actions which are the subject of this exertion of reason are in themselves lawful or unlawful, and are, therefore, as such necessarily commanded or prohibited by God."m

Grotius distinguished the law of nations from the natural law by the different nature of its origin and obligation, which he attributed to the general consent of nations as evidenced in their usage and practice. In the introduction to his treatise on the laws of war and peace, he says:

"I have used in favour of this law the testimony of philosophers, historians, poets, and even of orators: not that they are indiscriminately to be relied on as impartial authority; since they often bend to the prejudice of their respective sects, the nature of their argument, or the interest of their cause; but because when many minds of different ages and countries concur in the same sentiment it must be referred to some general cause. In the subject now in question this cause must be either a just deduction from the principles of natural justice, or universal consent. The first discovers to us the natural law, the second the law of nations.

Grotius, de J. B. ac P. lib. i. cap. i. § x. 1, 2.