element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress
and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a
legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing, but it
is better still that the offender should live for repentance and
reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good
and evil, and make States worthy to last, were not yet found.

The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by
party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost
literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination under a
law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains
it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal
reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this
foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In
gathering the materials of international law, he had to go beyond
national treaties and denominational interests for a principle embracing
all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we
suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that
they must be found independently of revelation. From that time it became
possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so
that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace
together, under the sanctions of a common law. Grotius himself used his
discovery to little purpose, as he deprived it of immediate effect by
admitting that the right to reign may be enjoyed as a freehold, subject
to no conditions.

When Cumberland and Pufendorf unfolded the true significance of his
doctrine, every settled authority, every triumphant interest recoiled
aghast. None were willing to surrender advantages won by force or skill,
because they might be in contradiction, not with the Ten Commandments,
but with an unknown code, which Grotius himself had not attempted to
draw up, and touching which no two philosophers agreed. It was manifest
that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of
conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their
adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them
would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the
plea of good intentions, which softens down the asperities of religious
strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth cen