were resorted to without protest; no sort of code of honor or humanity was recognized, and justification for hideous cruelty was often found by the Church in the pages of the Bible.
At a period when Europe was one broad battlefield, when wars were raging between races, between nations, and between religious sects, and hatred, misery, cruelty, and torture were filling the world with horror, and in a country that was suffering more than any other from these fearful evils, was born a man who, in spite of the darkness around him and in spite of the overwhelming forces which seemed to be subduing mankind, set to work to save civilization from ruin and to establish law and reason in the relations of nations. This man was Huig de Groot, known afterwards to the world as Hugo Grotius, who was born at Delft, in Holland, on Easter Day of 1583. He will be recognized for all time as the founder of international law, and as the first man who awakened the conscience of governments to a higher moral sense, to more humanitarian feelings, and to the recognition of the fact that there was such a thing as international duty. "I saw," he said, "in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reverence of law, Divine or human. A declaration of war seemed to let loose every crime."
The foundation of his idea was that the Law of
