Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/18

12 2. Again, it is especially difficult to prophesy perpetuity of an institution or practice which is essentially protean in character, and has undergone, and is still undergoing, manifold changes in its most distinguishing features. It is hardly possible to embrace under the same name the sort of incessant feuds between tribe and tribe which prevail at a time when union for purposes of conflict is the main basis of national association, and actual conflict is at once the absorbing occupation and the chief stimulus of life, and the occasional wars which interrupt the equable progress of a society uniformly given to pacific pursuits. Between these two extremes, again, there is the stage, such as was represented in the middle Feudal period, when military and pacific interests equally divide men's thoughts and lives.

To each of these conditions of War correspond varieties in the mode of conducting War, and in the moral aspect under which it is viewed. In the most primitive period, scarcely any distinction can be drawn between the form and spirit of the contests and the unrestricted ferocity which marks the internecine struggles of wild beasts. The object of the fight is one little short of mutual extermination, and the conduct of it is marked throughout with personal vindictivencss and bloodthirsty hatred. In the next stage, War begins to be regarded as a means to an end outside itself, and more lasting than itself. The notion of national right, as a legal conception, has begun to disclose itself, and War is regarded as merely a temporary suspense of well-ascertained relationships. Under some such forms as those of chivalry, or of religious obligations enforced, perhaps, by the head of a common spiritual community, restrictive measures are introduced into the modes of conducting War, especially in relation to the treatment of prisoners, and the observance of positive engagements. At a still later stage, the laws which regulate the conduct of War have become almost as numerous and cumbrous as those which ascertain the relations of