Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III INTERNATIONAL LAW IN treating of the system of international relationship and the different pieces of international machinery for ordering the society of nations, the first question to be considered is the general rules which regulate the conduct of nations to one another in their various relations. International Law is the body of such rules. I do not propose to touch such academic questions as whether International Law is or is not law, or even the question what it really is, but no practical enquiry is possible into the means of pacifically settling international differences without a clear understanding of the part which International Law has played, and will play, in the matter. It would be an easy and a human thing to say, what you may hear said repeatedly to-day in any intellectual company of human beings, that International Law has been proved not to exist. As a matter of fact, the whole history of the nineteenth century and of this war shows that International Law does exist, and is of supreme importance. The cry that it does not exist is merely the cry of shallow despair at finding that it does not exist precisely in the form that we desire. The fact that the rules of International Law are broken, and that those rules have not been able to prevent certain wars, does not prove that the rules do not exist, or that they have not been, and will not be, the most potent instruments in keeping the peace. People still do commit murders, and a man occasionally spits into the drawing-room fire, but it would be a false deduction that therefore the law against murder is useless, or that the social rule which regulates the conduct of gentlemen in drawing-rooms does not help people to repress a natural desire to expectorate. The mere fact that every belligerent...