ommon and universal International Law,
for the former implies a Justiciar State which is capable of enforcing
its decisions and dispositions, while the latter implies the
non-existence of any political power capable of enforcing the action
agreed or decided upon.

Fortunately, there is every evidence that at the present time this
narrow political sect who believe that law is only a human edict
supported by physical force,--this sect which had its origin in the
dark decades of the nineteenth century when the materialistic
philosophy prevailed--is dying out, under the influence of a general
renaissance. There are, it is to be believed, many who will be ready
and willing to accept as true the statement, which every student of
political history must admit to be true, that the philosophy of the
American Revolution was a religious philosophy. It is indeed perhaps
not too much to say that the period of the American Revolution was the
period in which both political and religious thinking reached the
highest point, and that there is no question of government which has
since arisen which was not either solved by the Revolutionary
statesmen or put in the process of solution.

The political philosophy of the American Revolution has long been
confused with that of the French Revolution. As matter of fact, they
stand at opposite poles. Our philosophy was religious, the French
non-religious. America had been peacefully assimilating, for a century
and a half, the doctrines of the Reformation. France had been held for
two centuries and a half in a condition of mediaevalism, and the
principles of the Reformation had little hold among the people. When
the Americans spoke, it was with the calm wisdom of free-men; when the
French spoke, it was with the folly and excess of intellectual and
spiritual slaves who had suddenly emancipated themselves. To the
Americans, to whom government was the expression of the just public
sentiment, government, equally with religion, was a necessary good; to
the French, to whom government was the expression of the will of the
majority, whether just or unjust, government was a necessary evil and
religion an unnecessary evil. The French Revolution made itself felt,
even in America, for a century. Till within recent years, its
principles have obscured, though they have never wholly eclipsed, the
principles of the American Revolution. But now there seems reason to
believe that the French Revolution has spent its