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THE PROLEGOMENA TO GROTIUS'S WORK, "DE JURE BELLI ET PACIS."

1. The civil law, both that of Rome and that of each nation in particular, has been treated of, with a view either to illustrate it or to present it in a compendious form, by many. But international law,- that which regards the mutual relations of several peoples or rulers of peoples,- whether it proceed from nature or be instituted by divine command or introduced by custom and tacit compact, has been touched on by few, and has been by no one treated as a whole in an orderly manner. And yet that this be done concerns the human race.

2. For rightly did Cicero call that an excellent science which includes the alliances, treaties, and covenants of peoples, kings, and nations, and all the rights of war and peace. And Euripides prefers this science to the knowledge of things human and divine; for he makes Helen address Theonoe thus:

'Twould be a base reproach

That you, who know th' affairs of gods and men
Present and future, know not what is just.

3. And such a work is the more necessary on this account,that there are not wanting persons in our own time, and there have been also in former times persons, who have despised what has been done, in this province of jurisprudence, so far as to hold that no such thing existed except as a mere name. Every one can quote the saying of Euphemius in Thucydides, that for a king or a city which has an empire to main

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