VII

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT BOSTON, MASS., JUNE 29, 1889

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY, BEFORE THE

PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

I SHALL have the honor to ask your attention this morning, without preface or exordium, to some thoughts upon the subject of international relations. What I have to say must be both general and discursive, but I hope may not be found altogether without the interest that arises from practical application.

The branch of jurisprudence upon which the rights and intercourse that exist between civilized nations are based has been commonly called international law. I do not think a less accurate phrase has often gained acceptance among instructed minds. In this subject, as in so many others, inexact language is both the cause and the result of inexact ideas. The word law, employed in any juridical sense, implies two indispensable elements-a supreme authority by which its obligation is prescribed, and a paramount force by which obedience is exacted. A system of proposed human conduct that lacks either of these conditions may be just and desirable, but it cannot reach the dignity of law. It may appeal, as the precepts of morality do, to conscience, to reason, and to policy, but it must remain only persuasive in its requirements, and voluntary in its obligation. Such are the rules that regulate the intercourse of nations.

It does not appear to me, therefore, that the world is much indebted to Jeremy Bentham (if it is particularly indebted to him for anything) for the invention of the term "international law." The older title, "law of nations," if it has a different meaning at all, as has sometimes been claimed, acquires it by being less accurate still. The term "international morality," which some writers have suggested, seems equally inadequate, because it expresses only the source instead of the comprehension of the system it attempts to define. I venture to suggest the term "international usage," not as beyond criticism, but as more nearly descriptive than any other I am able to propose for this youngest and most rapidly developing chapter in the science of jurisprudence. But whatever the name, perhaps you will pardon a few introductory words in respect to the foundation upon which the fabric rests and the nature of the superstructure that has been raised upon it.

Much speculation has been lavished upon the subject of the true origin and sanction of international obligation, by many and celebrated writers, from Grotius down to the present time. Each has constructed his own theory, and has criticised with more or less success those who have gone before. It would be neither possible nor interesting to attempt to review them here, or to point out how many are the distinctions that have been laboriously constructed out of how few real differences. They seem to arise in great part from efforts at an artificial division of an inseparable whole; from a widely variant understanding of the meaning of unnecessary terms; and from a confusion, which is often the bane of juridical writing,