Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/119

standpoint is seen in the sub-title to his work: 'Principles of the Law of Nature, applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns'. He is not, however, a pure 'Naturalist': he is one of 'the Grotians' of the eighteenth century by reason of his intermediate position, neither absolutely Naturalist nor pronouncedly Positivist. This intermediate position made the appeal to him the readier, if also somewhat flexible, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it combined with the clearness of his enunciations to give to his work a high place and long-continued influence in the conduct of diplomacy. For an Appendix to his Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with respect to France (1793), Burke made considerable extracts from Vattel's work, dealing principally with intervention and with the idea underlying 'the political system' of Europe.^[1] 'Vattel,' said Fox, in the House of Commons, in January 1794, 'than whom I know of no man more eminent in the science on which he has written, has laid it down as a principle, that every independent nation has an undoubted right to regulate its form of government.'^[2] 'My honourable friend,'^[3] he had remarked, in words immediately preceding,

'in attempting to prove that the origin of the war^[4] was not imputable to this country, treated the established principles of the law of nations with as little respect as M. Genet, the French minister to the United States of America.: My honourable friend said that no dependence could be placed upon the authority of Vattel, with respect to the question of an interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and that arguments might be drawn from his work favourable to either side. He contended that there might exist circumstances of

Oxford, 1834, i. 11, foot-note) said of Vattel's Le Droit des Gens that it 'has obtained the highest authority among practical statesmen'.

1. Works (1823), vii. 201–15.
2. Speeches (1815), v. 256.
3. William Windham.
4. War with France, February 1793.