INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION eternal city ruling through her spiritual head, the bishop of Rome, and through her temporal head, the emperor. When that ancient and imposing theory was rejected, so far as the Teutonic nations were con cerned, it became necessary for them to establish some common superior to whom all could bow without a loss of dignity. Then it was that an epoch-making man came forth, Hugo Grotius, the founder of the modern system of international law. He became imbued with the dominant idea of his age which was that nature herself is a law-giver. As such he placed her upon the vacant Imperial throne, and then under took to interpret her mandates to nations who would admit no other superior. The corner stones of the Grotian system are, first, that each state or nation is sovereign and independent, and as such coequal with all the rest; second, that territory and juris diction are coextensive. Having thus es tablished a common basis of equality, the difficulty that remained was how to subject sovereign states, through their own voli tion, to the yoke of legality. For centuries the family of nations, thus created, has been striving to solve that knotty problem through concerted action, in diplomatic congresses and conferences, and through treaties and conventions. THE CONCERT OF EUROPE.
The first diplomatic congress in which the sovereign states of Europe ever as sembled was that which concluded, in 1648, the famous Peace of Westphalia, whereby the conflict that had convulsed Germany for more than a century was definitely closed at the end of the Thirty Years' War, in the two treaties signed at Miinster and Osnabriick. In those treaties was em bodied a general settlement that survived without a break as the basis of the public law of Europe down to the French Revolu tion. The underlying motive of that settle ment was the creating of such a concert of action between the greater states as would
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preserve what has since been known as the balance of power. According to the Gro tian theory, which the Peace of Westphalia frankly recognized, all states, great and small, are, as territorial sovereigns, co equal before the law of nations. Within its own territory each is supreme; territory and jurisdiction are co-extensive. And yet, de spite those plain provisions of the written code, there has grown up alongside of it a set of tacit understandings which have sub ordinated the legal rights of the theoreti cally equal European states to a higher law upon whose authority rests the primacy or overlordship vested in the powers that now constitute the Concert of Europe. That primacy or overlordship, gradually devel oped outside of the written treaty law since the Peace of Westphalia, represents the common superior which actually succeeded to the place made vacant by the collapse of the medieval empire as an international power. With the advent of the eighteenth century the European Concert — made up, in the main,, prior to that time, of France, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Holland, and Eng land — was widened by the addition of new elements that entirely changed the politics of the world. Such elements were repre sented by the new empire of Russia, built up in the north by the genius of Peter the Great and Catherine; by the powerful and independent kingdom of Prussia, lifted from a secondary place in the German Empire by the military ambition of Frederick II; and by the colonial possessions of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Hol land in the continents of America and Asia, and in the eastern and western isles. The famous Peace of Paris, signed in 1763 by the four powers first named, for the purpose of concluding the world-wide contest, made possible by reason of their colonial domin ions, marked a transition from a condition of things in which the relative weight of European states had depended entirely upon their possessions within Europe itself. The world had learned already that wars begun
