Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/411

Rh final important advance in this direction that remains to be made, and means that peaceful commerce has been rescued from the demon war. Should it be made, the trenchers of St. Andrews students may well whirl in the air with cheers.

The Treaty of Washington is probably to rank in history as Mr. Gladstone's greatest service, because it settled by arbitration the Alabama Claims, a question fraught with danger, and which, if left open, would probably have driven apart and kept hostile to each other for a long period the two branches of the English-speaking race. A statesman less powerful with the great masses of his countrymen could not have carried the healing measure, for much had to be conceded by Britain, for which it deserves infinite credit. Three propositions were insisted upon by America as a basis for arbitration, and although all were reasonable and should have been part of international law, still they were not. Their fairness being recognized, Mr. Gladstone boldly and magnanimously agreed that the arbiters should be guided by them. These defined very clearly the duties of neutrals respecting the fitting out of ships of war in their ports, or the use of their ports as a naval base. This they must now use 'due diligence' to prevent.

Morley says, in his Life of Gladstone: "The Treaty of Washington and the Geneva arbitration stand out as the most noble victory in the 19th century of the noble art of preventive diplomacy, and the most signal exhibition in their history of self-command in two of three chief democratic powers of the Western World."

The Brussels Convention met in 1874.

Even as late as the earlier half of last century the giving up of towns and their inhabitants to the fury of the troops which stormed them was permitted by the usages of war. Defending his conduct in Spain, Wellington says: "I believe it has always been understood that the defenders of a fortress stormed have no right to quarter." After the storming of San Sebastian, as to plunder, he says: "It has fallen to my lot to take many towns by storm, and I am concerned to add that I never saw nor heard of one so taken by any troops that it was not plundered."

Shakespeare's description of the stormed city can never be forgotten:

 The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flushed soldier rough and hard In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell.

This inhuman practise was formally abolished by the Brussels Declaration—that 'a town taken by storm shall not be given up to the victorious troops to plunder.' To-day to put a garrison to the sword would be breach of the law of quarter, as well as a violation of