EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT stood, to the student of law. It is to be regretted, therefore, that so few subscribers to this publication are found in this country.
INTERNATIONAL LAW (Biography.
Grotius)
AN interesting sketch of Hugo Grotius by Sir William Rattigan, K. C., is printed in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legisla tion (New Series No. xiii, p. 68). It is largely concerned with his celebrated treatise DC jure Belli et Pads, to which subject it is interest ing to note that his attention was turned in the active pursuit of his profession, as ad vocate for the Dutch East India Company, which was formed, it is true, for the peaceful purposes of commerce, but had been com pelled, like the English company, to repel force by force. "No one," he says, "prior to Grotius knew how to unite to the same ex tent the authority of reason combined with that of experience; his is the fruitful alliance of philosophy and history, which has so pro foundly impressed the modern political world. The method which our author adopts is the inductive one. The individual man and his social instinct is the factor producing law and the State; but this appetitis socialis is not the mere need for a life spent somehow in com munity with his fellow-men, but tranquilly and as a reasonable being for the welfare of others in contrast to mere utility irrespective of all ethical motives. It is this tendency to the conservation of society, which is in agree ment with the nature of the human intellect, that forms the source of Jus or Natural Law, properly so-called." "In this way, he leads up to the humane principle which pervades his whole treatise, that between individuals, as between nations, it is not Utility but a common law of Rights which is of force in governing their mutual relations. To have established this principle and to have ex tended its operation to the conduct of war was to have justified his claim to be regarded as the founder, or as Marten calls him, the father, of the science of International Law, and to be called, as Vico suggests, 'the juristconsult of the human race.' That his work is not perfect, that he does not conceive as clearly as some later jurists — like Christian Thomasius, for instance — have done the dis
tinction between religion on the one hand, and law and morality on the other, and that he has not completely succeeded in disen tangling himself from the bewildering maze of incoherent and arbitrary notions of ethical philosophy which prevailed in his time, may be conceded without detracting from his gen eral merits, as one who, in the midst of a cruel and desolating war, was the first to discover a principle of right and a basis for society which was not derived from the Church or the Bible, nor in the insulated ex istence of the individual, but in the social relations of men, and to make it thus easy for those who followed him to broaden the pathway he had broken, and to elaborate his science."
JURISPRUDENCE (Nature of Law. Definition of Law) THE most important publication of the month in the field of abstract jurisprudence is an analysis of the nature of Law and at tempt to formulate a definition of the term by Melville M. Bigelow in the Columbia Law Review for January (Vol. v, p. 3). Though difficult to condense, it may be summarized as follows: — A scientific school of legal thought requires a working definition of the term law. Blackstone's famous definition, "Law is a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the Supreme power in a State commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong" is dangerous in what it suggests as well as unsound in details, (i) It suggests that the sovereign may be external, but supreme power under English or American law is not external, but a neces sary phase of organized society of which every member is a part. It is external only with reference to individuals. (2) "Rule of civil conduct" is indefinite, for no hint of the basis of the rule is given. "Rule" suggests require ment, yet much of the law may be simply a grant of authority for acquiring rights which before had no existence except in the State. (3) The word "prescribed" is unsatisfactory whether in the sense that law must be "noti fied to the people" or that it is to be set down in fixed terms; it is enough, so far as any requirement of notice is concerned, that
