Page:Two Introductory Lectures on the Science of International Law.djvu/22

 of the whole commonwealth or state in which he liveth. For as civil law, being the act of the whole body politic, doth overrule each several part of the same body, so there is no reason that any one commonwealth of itself should, to the prejudice of another, annihilate that whereupon the whole world has agreed.”

It is acknowledged by every one, in the language of Mr. Hallam, one of the latest and ablest of the numerous writers who have discussed the merits of the treatise of Grotius on the Right of War and Peace, that the publication of this work marked an epoch in the philosophical, and it may be said, in the political history of Europe. According to one of the letters of Grotius to Gassendi, quoted by Stewart, and alluded to by Barbeyrac, the scheme was suggested to him by Peirescius. Sir James Mackintosh couples with Peirescius the name of our great countryman Lord Bacon, as having by his advice contributed to the undertaking of so arduous a task. “It may be reckoned,” writes Mr. Hallam, “as a proof of the extraordinary diligence as well as quickness of parts which distinguished this writer, that it occupied a very short part of his life. He first mentions it in a letter to the younger Thuanus in August 1623, that he was employed in examining the principal questions which belong to the Law of Nations. In the same year he recommends the study of that law to another of his correspondents in terms which denote his own attention to it.” The work itself was published in Paris two years later, in 1625. It had been composed by its illustrious author in the house of the President de Mesmes near Senlis in France, whither he had retired on his escape from the fortress of Louvestein. The story of his wife’s devotion and