stilities, and that, in the artificial natural condition
thus produced, the institution of private property falls into abeyance
so far as concerns the belligerents. As the later writers on the Law
of Nature have always been anxious to maintain that private property
was in some sense sanctioned by the system which they were expounding,
the hypothesis that an enemy's property is _res nullius_ has seemed to
them perverse and shocking, and they are careful to stigmatise it as a
mere fiction of jurisprudence. But, as soon as the Law of Nature is
traced to its source in the Jus Gentium, we see at once how the goods
of an enemy came to be looked upon as nobody's property, and therefore
as capable of being acquired by the first occupant. The idea would
occur spontaneously to persons practising the ancient forms of
Warfare, when victory dissolved the organisation of the conquering
army and dismissed the soldiers to indiscriminate plunder. It is
probable, however, that originally it was only moveable property which
was thus permitted to be acquired by the Captor. We know on
independent authority that a very different rule prevailed in ancient
Italy as to the acquisition of ownership in the soil of a conquered
country, and we may therefore suspect that the application of the
principle of occupancy to land (always a matter of difficulty) dates
from the period when the Jus Gentium was becoming the Code of Nature,
and that it is the result of a generalisation effected by the
jurisconsults of the golden age. Their dogmas on the point are
preserved in the Pandects of Justinian, and amount to an unqualified
assertion that enemy's property of every sort is _res nullius_ to the
other belligerent, and that Occupancy, by which the Captor makes them
his own, is an institution of Natural Law. The rules which
International jurisprudence derives from these positions have
sometimes been stigmatised as needlessly indulgent to the ferocity and
cupidity of combatants, but the charge has been made, I think, by
persons who are unacquainted with the history of wars, and who are
consequently ignorant how great an exploit it is to command obedience
for a rule of any kind. The Roman principle of Occupancy, when it was
admitted into the modern law of Capture in War, drew with it a number
of subordinate canons, limiting and giving precision to its operation,
and if the contests which have been waged since the treatise of
Grotius became an authority, are com