in 1899, the first Hague Conference agreed to practically the same plan as was outlined by the lawyer of Coutances. But in his day the nations were not ready; they must wait. In 1624, Le Nouveau Cynée (the New Cyneas) by Eméric Crucé, appeared in Du Bois's country, and was the first book that explicitly developed the thought of a regular system of arbitration. It was followed by The Great Design of Henry IV, published fifty years after his death in the posthumous memoirs of his great minister, the Duke of Sully. This was the first comprehensive scheme in modern history to organise the world. The king or his minister (there is much controversy about it) had planned a federation of the European states, with a central senate and proportionate contributions from the various nations to the common international army and navy, which should insure the substitution of legal methods for the prevailing system of war. Ravaillac's dagger, in 1610, frustrated this scheme, just at the time that little John Milton was learning to talk and Shakespeare had completed his greatest tragedies and was retiring from London to Stratford.

But the world was still not ready, and its organisation must be postponed three centuries as a practical political achievement. One class of hideous wrongs, however, could be ameliorated. Five years after the little band of English exiles coming out of Holland had reared their first log cabin beside Plymouth Rock, the greatest scholar

and benefactor whom that same brave little Holland ever produced published an epoch-making book-The Rights of War and Peace. On July 4, in 1899, the hundred diplomats assembled at the first Hague Conference, led by the head of our American delegation, Dr. Andrew D. White, travelled together to ancient Delft and, after gazing on the noble statue of Hugo Grotius which adorns the square, entered the great bare church where Grotius lies buried. As each national group arrived, their ears were greeted by the organ notes of their own national air. There, in an august company, they gathered around the marble monument while the representatives from America in behalf of their government and people laid a superb silver wreath upon it, as Ambassador White delivered a eulogy on the immense service which this great soul had wrought for all mankind. “Of all works," said he, "not claiming to be inspired, The Rights of War and Peace has proved the greatest blessing to humanity."

The prodigious learning of this great scholar, who was sought by the elegant young Milton on his visit to Paris because he said he venerated him more than any other living man, and the cumulative force of his legal and ethical arguments, reinforced by copious citations from the ancients, gradually produced a marvellous effect on an age accustomed to savage butchery in war, in which neither age nor sex nor the helplessness of wounded and prisoners had availed to secure either justice

or clemency. The world may thank Hugo Grotius primarily for the kindly treatment which in recent wars Americans gave to Spanish prisoners and Japanese gave to Russians.

The Rights of War and Peace was the first great attempt to deduce a principle of right and a philosophic basis for society independent of biblical and ecclesiastical authority. It had an immediate effect all over Europe. Gustavus Adolphus is said to have slept during his campaigns with a copy under his head of this great work by the man who is properly called "the father of International Law."

His unlearned but ardent contemporary in England, George Fox, born three years before the publication of The Rights of War and Peace, began a movement as permanent as the influence of this book. In his quaint suit of leather, this preacher of the inner light fared up and down the city streets during the Civil War boldly proclaiming, "Woe, woe to the bloody city": He and the great body of Friends, his followers, like the early Christian martyrs, endured dungeons, and stripes and persecution of every kind, but they stood steadfast in their faith, fighting with their tongues, which sometimes were sharp indeed, and receiving the appellation, "Quakers," because they made the enemies of peace to quake, not because they themselves had faltered. A few of them later, founding the City of Brotherly Love, treated the natives of the New World so justly that as every