'It is not my disposition', said Sir James Mackintosh, in reference to Vattel and his predecessors,
'to over-rate the authority of this class of writers, or to consider authority in any case as a substitute for reason. But these eminent writers were at least necessarily impartial. Their weight, as bearing testimony to general sentiment and civilised usage, receives a new accession from every statesman who appeals to their writings, and from every year in which no contrary practice is established or hostile principles avowed. Their works are thus attested by successive generations to be records of the customs of the best times, and depositories of the deliberate and permanent judgments of the more enlightened part of mankind. Add to this, that their authority is usually invoked by the feeble, and despised by those who are strong enough to need no aid from moral sentiment, and to bid defiance to justice. I have never heard their principles questioned, but by those whose flagitious policy they had by anticipation condemned.'[1]
It is a relief to the student of history and the appraiser of actual policy to pass from the qualified naturalism of Vattel to the clear-voiced positivism of G. F. von Martens. The change is as bracing as a course of The Federalist after a considerable dose of The Social Contract. It is highly appropriate that the author of the Précis du Droit des Gens moderne should be also the originator of the best Collection of Treaties; and the attitude of mind he brought to bear on his analysis and exposition of the law of nations is almost sufficiently revealed in the full title of his work. The work, which was first published in the year before the outbreak of the French Revolution,
- ↑ Speech, April 27, 1815.
was put on the question of Saxony at the Congress of Vienna, and on the question of the annexation of Genoa to the Kingdom of Sardinia in Sir James Mackintosh's speech in the House of Commons, April 27, 1815: History, 426–7, 490–1; Mackintosh's Miscellaneous Works (1851), 703–4, and foot-note.
