THE LAW OF NATIONS.
A History of the Law of Nations. Vol. I. Prom the Earliest Times to the Peace of Westphalia. By Thomas Alfred Walker,
M.A., LL.D. (Cambridge University Press. 10s. net.)—Mr.
Walker has undertaken to write a history of international law, not in the ordinary fashion by grouping it under a series of doctrines, but in direct historical sequence. The difficulty, of course, is that, save in the vaguest sense, international law is a modern growth, and the man who would write its history from
the earliest times is compelled to change his definition often in the course of his narrative. We cannot call Mr. Walker's method a rigorously scientific one. He is driven to far-fetched parallels, and often to a too generous interpretation of early customs, and he has been compelled by his method to compile a sort of confused and disjointed history of the world. Law which depended on religious sentiment and law which had the clearest secular sanction alternate without much distinction. The book is full of out-of-the-way learning and much ingenuity, but we cannot help thinking the method unfortunate. It is not sufficiently a history of principles, and far too much a series of historical jottings. Part I. is headed "The Evolution of International Law," but we are left to discover the character of the evolution from Mr. Walker's ample quotations. There is a lack, too, of nice distinctions. Very different thinkers are grouped together under the unfortunate chronological arrange- ment, and their doctrines are paraphrased without any clear analysis or criticism. The fault, of course, lies mainly in the subject, but the work is rather a common-place book for the international lawyer than a legal history. But apart from such formal defects, the book has conspicuous merits. Mr. Walker's criticism of the Anstinian doctrine of law, which Lord Salisbury once defended in a speech in 1887 on International Arbitration, is an excellent piece of work, though it has been done before. The summaries of mediteval legalists are good and full, and the curious learning of the book is made accessible for reference by a very complete index. If Mr. Walker is bent upon a history of every vague hint of international relations he might have mentioned the Egyptian diplomatic code, which Pythagoras was supposed to have introduced into Greece, and it was a pity to omit the international law within the Roman Empire, which governed the sending of embassies from the provinces to the capital,—a real code with a very effective sanction. We shall look forward with great interest to the second volume, where the author's scholarship and industry will find a more worthy field.
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