One chief reason whyon the wholenaval usages are reasonable and humaneisthat the belligerents were checked by the neutralsIn land wars a neutralcan only affect proceedings to which he objects by taking part in the strife;but from the very first the belligerent maritime Powers were prevented fromgoing to the full lengths of predatory destructiveness by the authority ofprize courtsIt ishoweverquite true that the commanders of land forcesdid gradually abandon the ferocity with which Tilly has been reproached.
There was no more humane commander on the whole than our own Duke of Wellington.
It is singularat the same timethat he constantly falls into an errorwith which English lawyers are specially chargedthat of confounding militarylawwhich is regulating lawwith martial lawwhich means the will of theofficer commandingHe always spoke of the law of war as consisting in thevolition of the Commander of the Forces.
The first great attempt which was made after the epoch of Grotius to givegeneral fixity and to humanise the law of land warwas made almost in ourday by an unfortunate sovereign to whom justice has never been fully done,Alexander II of RussiaHe does seem to have been animatedas were boththe statesmen and literary men occasionally in the eighteenth centurybyan enthusiasm for humanityYou are all aware that almost immediately afterhis succession to the Russian throne he abolished serfdombut his effortsto reform International Lawand specially the usages of warare less remembered.
He joined in promoting the Geneva Conventionof which I shall say much presently;he was the author of the proposal for renouncing the use of certain weaponswhich caused wounds of unusual painfulnessand he was the sovereign whosummoned and who took an unflagging interest in the Brussels Convention of 1874The Brussels Convention failedand we shallfindI thinkhereafter that the reasons why it failed are remarkably instructive.
I will say that one of the grounds for its not coming to maturity wasthatit was commenced too soon after one of the greatest of modern warswhichprobably never had a rival in the violence of the passions which it excited.
England before the Convention met had stipulated for the omission of alldiscussion of the rules of naval warTheseI supposewere considered tohave been sufficiently settled for the day by the Declaration of Parisandat the close of the discussions of the Conferencewhen even its membersadmitted that they had been able to agree on a very small part of the matterssubmitted to themit was the English Foreign Secretary of StateLord Derby,who finally gave the Convention its deathblowUndoubtedly the smaller Powersof Europeand the Powers which have not yet taken up the system of greatarmies raised by conscriptionhad very serious reasons for objecting tomany of its suggestionswhich had not unnaturally sprung up in the mindsof military men who sympathised either with France or with Germany in thewar which a few years before had been brought to a conclusionThe BrusselsConference hadhoweverone result which had great importance and interest.
Just at the close of the American War of Secession the United States hadprepared a Manual of Rule and Usage for the use of their officers in thefieldThis example -the formation of a practical Manual stating for theofficers of each nation what contingencies they were to be prepared for inactual contest and how they were to deal with them -was followed by Germany,by Englandand by Franceand some of these Manuals have been adopted bysmaller PowersBut they were all greatly affected by the recommendationsof the Conference of Brusselsand in reality it may be said that whereverthere was anything like an approach to unanimity in the decisions and votesof the Conferenceit is adopted in this somewhat irregular form by the greaterpart of the nations of the world.
The Manual prepared for English officerswhich wasI believechieflycompiled by the present Lord Thringthen the official draftsman of the BritishGovernmentis one of the bestVisibly the writer has taken all that hecould take from the humaner doctrines of the publicistsmore particularlyfrom Vattelbut he never pretends to lay down authoritatively the lawwhichhe nevertheless declares in such a form that it is now possible for a studentof law to read it and to gain from it a very vivid notion of what a landwar in which England was engaged would be like if unhappily it occurred.
I will proceed to read to you certain passages from this Manualtaking portionsat the same time from other Manualsand making some remarks as I go on uponthe older history of the customs of war of which it treatsI am sorry tosay that the British Government has not thought fit to allow it to be published,and therefore I am afraid it cannot be procuredIt begins with a statementof general principles.
