produce permanent jural relations. Sometimes, moreover, the submission, even though brought about by conquest, is not wholly involuntary. The German States which united themselves to Prussia in order to form the German Empire, can scarcely be said to have acted at variance even with their proximate will; though in some of them, as in Hanover and Saxony, there was, and probably continues to be, much conflict of sympathies. But where this conflict does not rest on diversity of race, if it is not perpetuated by interference with local institutions, it rarely extends beyond the second generation. The Poles, it is said, are becoming reconciled to Russian rule; and in fifty years Alsace and Lorraine will be more German than they ever were French.

CHAPTER XVIII.

OF NEUTRALITY IN GENERAL.

Neutrality is an abnormal relation, existing between one or more recognising States at peace and two or more recognised States at war, which becomes a jural relation only when intervention becomes impossible.

We have seen (Chap. II.) that, as active take precedence of passive duties in all the abnormal relations in which rational entities stand to each other ethically, so intervention takes precedence of neutrality jurally-i.e., by the law of nations. Neutrality is thus not only an abnormal relation in itself, on

the ground that, like intervention, it is justified only by necessity, but it is an abnormal relation which is justified only by the necessary exclusion of the preferable abnormal jural relation of intervention.

A proclamation of neutrality is an announcement by the State which makes it of its determination to let ill alone; and, as we have seen in studying the doctrine of intervention, the law of nations does not entitle us to let ill alone-if we can help it. We cannot be jurally neutral till it has ceased to be jurally possible for us to intervene.

These general remarks apply equally to neutrality between States at peace and States at war, and between States at peace in the presence of war, or neutrals inter se. When jurally possible, intervention is a duty which neutral States owe to each other, as well as to the States at war.

But logically and inevitably as this doctrine seems to me to result from the dependence of law upon ethics, and from the consequent principle of the mutual responsibility of recognising States the principle on which international law depends for its existence-I am well aware that it is at variance, not only with popular sentiment, but with the prevailing opinion of jurists. By both, neutrality is enrolled amongst the normal

"When thus running counter to general opinion, I am gratified to find that I have on my side so great an authority as Jeremy Bentham.

"A disinterested legislator,' he says, 'would regard as a positive crime every proceeding by which a given nation should do more injury to foreign nations collectively, whose interests might be affected, than it should do good to itself. ... In the same manner he would regard as a negative offence every determination by which the given nation should refuse to tender positive services to a foreign nition when rendering of them would produce more good to such foreign nation than it would produce evil to itself."-Wheaton's History of the Law of Nations, p. 332.

relations, and is regarded, if not as a virtue, at all events as an attitude, always justifiable, and generally commendable,— an attitude which every State is morally and jurally entitled to assume when it pleases, and which other States ought to aid and encourage it in assuming and maintaining.

It was on this ground that my revered and lamented colleague, Dr Bluntschli, in contradiction, as it humbly appeared to me, of the doctrines of positive international duty to which in other directions he gives so much prominence, objected to the doctrine which I have here propounded, when stated by me in a paper which I presented to the International Institute at its meeting at Geneva in September 1874.

"The normal condition of nations," Dr Bluntschli said, "is peace and not war. The object of international law is to guarantee peace and more and more to restrain war, considered as an inevitable exception.

"The neutrality of States is the maintenance of peace and the limitation of war to the belligerent States, in so far as this may be possible. I cannot, therefore, admit that neutral States are in an exceptional situation. They are so only to the extent to which they may be unable to withdraw themselves from all the consequences of the war.'

Now here, as I have said, it appears to me that the great publicist, in what he conceived to be the interests of peace, has overlooked the active duties of humanity as an element in the jural relations between separate communities. Dr Bluntschli was not one of those superficial specialists who

1 Communications relatives à l'Institut de Droit International.—Revue de Droit International, 1874, pp. 278, 279.

would cut jurisprudence loose from ethics in order to conceal the shallowness of their dogmas; and he would have agreed with me, I am sure, that, though called into action on a vastly wider field, the rules of conduct which govern communities do not differ in principle from those which govern individuals. Dr Bluntschli knew well that the laws of ethics are as universal as the laws of logic or mathematics—nay, that they are more universal than the latter, seeing that there is no reason to suppose that they are limited by the conditions of time and space. He would have admitted that the existence of a rational subject and a rational object involved the existence of ethical relations between them.

Let us look at the relation of neutrality, then, as existing, not between States but between individuals, and see on what conditions it becomes a jural relation. Let us suppose that two of Dr Bluntschli's colleagues of the Institute, differing as to the seizure of private property at sea, had appealed to the ultimate ground of decision, and were scandalising the citizens of Geneva by fighting on the street. Would Dr Bluntschli have thought that he, or any other member or members of the body, did his or their duty, or occupied a jural relation to the combatants or to each other, by looking on, or running away? Still, the latter clearly would have been the course by which he or they would have been able most readily "de se soustraire à toutes les consequences de la guerre." The case would no doubt have been altered if the spectator of the struggle had himself been lying prostrate with a broken leg. His neutrality would then have been justified by necessity; but it would still have been

jural only, not normal, because it would have owed its jural character to the abnormal condition of his physical frame. It would have been justified only by necessity, as war is justified; and if Dr Bluntschli acquits neutrality of an abnormal character, he has no right to ascribe an abnormal character to war. It is necessity alone which can justify either, and necessity is not a source of normal rights or duties. If a normal character must thus be denied even to neutrality, which necessity has brought within the sphere of jurisprudence, much less can it be conceded to voluntary neutrality. The subject is one with which I have already dealt in various aspects, and to which I may have occasion to recur. But I have thought it right, in defence of the classification which I have adopted, to repeat, at the outset of our discussion of the doctrine of neutrality, that to ascribe to it a normal character, and to place it on a footing of equality with peace, seems to me to involve nothing short of a separation of law from morality. It is to introduce a confusion between the discharge and the neglect of duty, between right and wrong. It is our old enemy the distinction between perfect and imperfect obligations, in one of the most pestilent of its many applications.

When a question has arisen between two States, and, above all, when that question has led to war, the object of international law is, not to ignore the war, but to remove the cause which has led to it; and this involves giving to the question, not the cheapest and speediest, but the most exhaustive, and, as such, the most permanent solution.

1 Institutes of Law, p. 281 et seq.

There