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rors of war. . . . His name has become too great to be celebrated by his native country alone: it can only be fitly celebrated in the presence of representatives from the whole world. For the first time in human history there are now assembled delegates with a common purpose from all the nations; and they are fully represented here. I feel empowered to speak words of gratitude not only from my own country, but from each of these. I feel that my own country, though one of the youngest in the great sisterhood of nations, utters at this shrine to-day not only her great gratitude, but that of every part of Europe, of all the great powers of Asia, of the sister republics of North and South America. From nations now civilized, but which Grotius knew only as barbarous, from nations which in his time were yet unborn, from every land where there are men who admire genius, who reverence virtue, who respect patriotism, who are grateful to those who have given their lives to toil, hardship, disappointment, and sacrifice for humanity,- from all these come thanks and greetings heartily mingled with our own.

This is the ancient and honored city of Delft. From its Haven, not distant, sailed the "Mayflower," bearing the Pilgrim Fathers who, in a time of obstinate and bitter persecution, brought to the American Continent the germs of that toleration which had been especially developed among them during their stay in the Netherlands, and of which Grotius was an apostle. In this town Grotius was born, in this temple he worshipped. These pavements he trod when a child. Often was this place revisited by him in his boyhood; at his death his mortal body was placed in this hallowed ground.

In the vast debt which all nations owe to Grotius, the United States acknowledges its part gladly. Perhaps in no other country has this thought penetrated more deeply and influenced more strongly the great mass of the people. . In all parts of our country the law of nations is especially studied by large bodies of young men in colleges and universities, -studied not professionally merely, but from the point of view of men eager to understand the fundamental principles of international rights and duties. The work of our compatriots, Wheaton, Kent, Field, Woolsey, Dana, Lawrence, and others, in developing more and more the ideas to which Grotius first gave life and strength, show that our country has not cultivated in vain this great field which Grotius opened.

An American jurist naturally sees, first, the relations of Grotius to the writers who preceded him. He sees other and lesser mountain peaks of thought emerging from the clouds of earlier history; and he acknowledges a debt to such men as Isidore of Seville, Suarez, Ayala, and Gentiles. But, when all this is acknowledged, he clearly sees Grotius, while rising from among these men, grandly towering above them. He sees in Grotius the first man who brought the main principles of those earlier thinkers to bear upon modern times,-increasing them from his own creative mind, strengthening them from the vast stores of his knowledge, enriching them from his imagination, glorifying them with his genius. His great mind brooded over that earlier chaos of opinion; and from his heart and brain, more than from those of any other, came a revelation to the modern world of new and better paths toward mercy and peace. But his agency was more than that. His coming was like the rising of the sun out of the primeval abyss: his work was both creative and illuminative. We may reverently insist that, in the domain of International Law, Grotius said: "Let there be light," and there was light. I need hardly remind you that

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it was mainly unheeded at first.

Yet we see that the great light streaming from his heart and mind continued to shine, that it developed and fructified human thought, that it warmed into life new and glorious growths of right reason as to international relations; and we recognize the fact that, from his day to ours, the progress of reason in theory, and of mercy in practice, has been constant on both sides of the Atlantic.

My honored colleagues of the Peace Conference, the germ of this work in which we are all so earnestly engaged lies in a single sentence of Grotius's great book. Others, indeed, had proposed plans for the peaceful settlement of differences between nations, and the world remembers them with honor. To all of them, from Henry IV. and Kant and St. Pierre and Penn and Bentham, down to the humblest writer in favor of peace, we may well feel grateful; but the germ of arbitration was planted in modern thought when Grotius, urging arbitration and mediation as preventing war, wrote these solemn words in the De Jure Belli ac Pacis: "Maxime autem christiani reges et civitates tenentur hanc inire viam ad arma vitanda.” *

From this tomb of Grotius I seem to hear a voice which says to us as the delegates of the nations: "Go on with your mighty work. Avoid, as you would avoid the germs of pestilence, those exhalations of international hatred which take shape in monstrous fallacies and morbid fictions regarding alleged antagonistic interests. Guard well the treasures of civilization with which each of you is intrusted; but bear in mind that you hold a mandate from humanity."

These are the words which an American seems to hear issuing from this shrine to-day; and I seem also to hear from it a prophecy. I seem to hear Grotius saying to us: "Fear neither opposition nor detraction. As my own book, which grew out of the Eighty Years' and the Thirty Years' War, contained the germ from which your great Conference has grown, so your work, which is demanded by a world bent almost to breaking under the weight of ever-increasing armaments, shall be a germ from which future Conferences shall evolve plans ever fuller, better, and nobler."

I know of nothing which better marks the high moral tone of modern history than that the sublime code of international law should have come into form and established its authority over the civilized world within so short a time; for it is now scarcely more than two hundred years since it took its being. In the most polished and splendid age of Greece and Grecian philosophy, piracy was a lawful and even honorable occupation. Man upon the waters and the shark in them had a common right to feed on what they could subdue. Nations were considered as natural enemies; and for one people to plunder another by force of arms and to lay their country waste was no moral wrong, any more than for the tiger to devour the lamb. In war no terms of humanity were binding, and the passions of the parties were mitigated by no constraints of law. Captives were butchered or sold into slavery at pleasure. In time of peace it was not without great hazard that the citizen of one country could venture into another for purposes of travel or business.

Go now with me to a little French town near Paris, and there you shall see in his quiet retreat a silent, thoughtful man, bending his ample "Especially are Christian kings and states bound to try this way of avoiding war?”

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shoulders and more ample countenance over his table, and recording with a visible earnestness something that deeply concerns the world. This man has no office or authority to make him a lawgiver other than what belongs to the gifts of his own person,— a brilliant mind enriched by the amplest stores of learning and nerved by the highest principles of moral justice and Christian piety. He is, in fact, a fugitive and an exile from his country, separated from all power but the simple power of truth and reason. But he dares, you will see, to write De Jure Belli et Pacis. This is the man who was smuggled out of prison and out of his country, by his wife, to give law to all the nations of mankind in all future ages. Ón the sea and on the land, on all seas and all lands, he shall bear sway. In the silence of his study he stretches forth the sceptre of law over all potentates and peoples, defines their rights, arranges their intercourse, gives them terms of war and terms of peace, which they may not disregard. In the days of battle, too, when kings and kingdoms are thundering in the shock of arms, this same Hugo Grotius shall be there in all the turmoil of passion and the smoke of ruin, as a presiding throne of law commanding above the commanders, and, when the day is cast, prescribing to the victor terms of mercy and justice, which not even his hatred of the foe nor the exultation of the hour may dare to transcend.- From Horace Bushnell's Address on The Growth of Law.

Hugo Grotius was born at Delft, in Holland, in 1583, and died in 1645. He was one of the greatest scholars of his time,- or, indeed, of any time, and this in almost every field of the learning of the age. At the age of fifteen he was engaged in editing classical texts; and he wrote three dramas in Latin. Taking the degree of doctor of laws at Leyden, he entered upon practice as an advocate, and soon became advocate-general of the fisc for the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. He wrote largely on theological subjects. In 1603 the United Provinces appointed him the official historian of their struggle with Spain. In 1613 he was one of a deputation to the English court to adjust certain differences between the two young maritime powers. He was soon plunged into the theological controversies in Holland; and he was condemned to imprisonment at the same time that Barnevelt was condemned to death. Escaping from prison through his wife's ingenuity, he took refuge in France, and there, in exile and poverty, composed his great work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, the principles and plan of which had been conceived as early as 1604, when he was a youth of twenty-one. It was published in 1625. After fruitless attempts to re-establish himself in Holland, he accepted service under the crown of Sweden as ambassador to the court of France. He died at Rostock in 1645 on a return journey from Stockholm.

There is no adequate book upon Grotius and his work in English, although there are important discussions by Hallam and many others. William Evats published an English translation of De Jure Belli et Pacis in 1682; and in 1738 another translation was published, anonymously, including the valuable notes of Barbeyrac. In 1853 William Whewell published a critical edition in three volumes, giving the full Latin text accompanied by an abridged translation; and this is emphatically the work to be commended to the English student of Grotius. The introduction to Grotius's work given in the present leaflet, stating the fundamental principles of the work, is Whewell's translation.

PUBLISHED BY

THE DIRECTORS OF THE OLD SOUTH WORK,

Old South Meeting-house, Boston, Mass.

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FROM THE JOURNAL OF COLUMBUS DURING HIS FIRST
VOYAGE, 1492.

Sunday, 28th of October.-"I went thence in search of the island of Cuba on a S.S.W. coast, making for the nearest point of it, and entered a very beautiful river without danger of sunken rocks or other impediments. All the coast was clear of dangers up to the shore. The mouth of the river was 12 brazos across, and it is wide enough for a vessel to beat in. I anchored about a lombard-shot inside." The Admiral says that "he never beheld such a beautiful place, with trees bordering the river, handsome, green, and different from ours, having fruits and flowers each one according to its nature. There are many birds, which sing very sweetly. There are a great number of palm trees of a different kind from those in Guinea and from ours, of a middling height, the trunks without that covering, and the leaves very large, with which they thatch their houses. The country is very level." The Admiral jumped into his boat and went on shore. He came to two houses, which he believed to belong to fishermen who had fled from fear. In one of them he found a kind of dog that never barks, and in both there were nets of palm-fibre and cordage, as well as horn fish-hooks, bone harpoons, and other apparatus "for fishing, and several hearths. He believed that

*

many people lived together in one house. He gave orders that nothing in the houses should be touched, and so it was done." The herbage was as thick as in Andalusia during

* Camisa.

April and May. He found much purslane and wild amaranth.* He returned to the boat and went up the river for some distance, and he says it was great pleasure to see the bright verdure, and the birds, which he could not leave to go back. He says that this island is the most beautiful that eyes have seen, full of good harbours and deep rivers, and the sea appeared as if it never rose; for the herbage on the beach nearly reached the waves, which does not happen where the sea is rough. (Up to that time they had not experienced a rough sea among all those islands.) He says that the island is full of very beautiful mountains, although they are not very extensive as regards length, but high; and all the country is high like Sicily. It is abundantly supplied with water, as they gathered from the Indians they had taken with them from the island of Guanahani. These said by signs that there are ten great rivers, and that they cannot go round the island in twenty days. When they came near land with the ships, two canoes came out; and, when they saw the sailors get into a boat and row about to find the depth of the river where they could anchor, the canoes fled. The Indians say that in this island there are gold mines and pearls, and the Admiral saw a likely place for them and mussel-shells, which are signs of them. He understood that large ships of the Gran Can came here, and that from here to the mainland was a voyage of ten days. The Admiral called this river and harbour San Salvador.†

Monday, 29th of October.-The Admiral weighed anchor from this port and sailed to the westward, to go to the city, where, as it seemed, the Indians said that there was a king. They doubled a point six leagues to the N.W.‡ and then another point, then east ten leagues. After another league he saw a river with no very large entrance, to which he gave the name of Rio de la Luna.|| He went on until the hour of Vespers. He saw another river much larger than the others, ¶ as the Indians told him by signs, and near he saw goodly villages of houses. He called the river Rio de Mares.** He shore to a village to communicate, and one had brought with him, for now they under

sent two boats on of the Indians he

* Verdolagas y bledas.

Punta de Mulas.-N.

† Puerto Naranjo. Nipe, according to Navarrete.

§ Punta de Cabañas.- N. || Puerto de Banes.-N.

¶ Puerto de las Nuevitas del Principe.-N.

** Afterwards Puerto de Baracoa, called by the Adelantado of Cuba, Diego Velasquez, Asumpcion. (Herrera, Dec. I, Lib. II, cap xiv.)

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