CHAPTER II.

SECTION I.

Actual War.—­Its Effects.

[Sidenote:  Objects of War.]

Vattel tells us

“The end of a just war is to avenge or prevent injury; that is to say, to obtain justice by force, when not obtainable by any other method; to compel an unjust adversary to repair an injury already done, or to give us securities against any wrong with which we are threatened by him.  As soon therefore as we have declared war, we have a right to do against the enemy whatever we find necessary for the attainment of that end, for the purpose of bringing him to reason, and obtaining justice and security from him.

“The lawfulness of the end does not give us any thing further than barely the means necessary for the attainment of that end.  Whatever we do beyond that, is reprobated by the law of nature—­is faulty and condemnable at the tribunal of conscience.  Hence it is that the right to such acts varies according to circumstance.  What is just and perfectly innocent in one situation is not always so on other occasions.  Right goes hand in hand with necessity and the exigency of the case, but never exceeds them.”

Such are some of the arguments that Vattel puts forth with all the strength of reason and eloquence, against all unnecessary cruelty, and all mean and perfidious warfare.

There was no limit to the career of violence and destruction, justified by some of the earlier writers; they considered a state of war as a dissolution of all moral ties, and a licence for every disorder and fierceness:  even such authors as Bynkershoek and Wolff, who lived in the most learned and not the least civilized nations of Europe, and were the contemporaries of that galaxy of talent that adorned the commencement of the eighteenth century, held that every thing done against an enemy was lawful.  He might be destroyed, though unarmed, harmless, defenceless; fraud, even poison, might be used against him.  A foe was a criminal and an outlaw, who had forfeited his rights, and whose life, liberty, and property, lay at the mercy of the victor.

But such was not the public opinion or practice of enlightened Europe at the time they wrote.  Grotius had long before, even in opposition to his own authorities, but influenced by religion and humanity, mentioned that many things were not fit and commendable, though they might be strictly lawful.  He held that the Law of Nations prohibited the use of poisoned arms, the employment of assassins, violence to women or the dead, or making slaves of prisoners.  Montesquieu followed in the same humane spirit.  He writes, that the civilians said,