HUGO GROTILTS.•
Tan name of Grotius has often been on men's lips of late years, but outside a limited circle of historical students and international jurists singularly little is known of the man and his career. There are few books about him in English, and the standard authority in Dutch is still the Life by Caspar Brandt, completed by Catten- burgh (1727), and supplemented by the Vie de Grotius by de Burigny (Paris, 1752). Thus in order to fit himself for the task performed in this timely volume Mr. Vreeland, of the New York Bar, had first to learn the language of his ancestors. The book, which has grown out of his Master's Thesis in International Law and Diplomacy submitted to the University of Columbia, is a useful piece of research work, inspired by genuine enthusiasm for the subject, and throwing a good deal of light on the character and influence of a great if not exactly heroic figure, who was successively the glory of his countrymen and the victim of her rulers.
So far as mere material success went there never was a career which more strikingly confirmed the truth of Solon's maxim. He came of an ancient and honourable family, whose name Groot or " Great " bore witness to their services to the State. His immediate ancestors were men of substance, distinguished alike for their learning and official aptitude. But Hugo Grotius eclipsed them all by his extraordinary talents and industry. He was acclaimed as a prodigy in his early boyhood ; and saluted as an equal by the greatest scholars of his time, Scaliger, Vossius, Lipsius, and Casaubon. Ho accompanied an important Embassy to France when he was only fifteen. His Latin verses were not perhaps as good as Milton's or as elegant as " Vinny " Bourne's, but they represented only the decorative side of his literary activi- ties. He wrote tragedies which appealed to Vondel, the great Dutch poet ; he knew all that was to be known of history and jurisprudence and theology long before he had reached man's estate. Distinctions, honours, and office poured in upon him. He surrendered his practice as an advocate to accept the important post of Advocate Fiscal or Attorney-General of Holland, Zeeland, and West Friesland in 1607, when he was only twenty-fora•. As early as 1601, when he was only eighteen, he had been selected by the States-General of the United Provinces to write what we should now call the official History of Holland with special reference to the struggle against Spain. This employed him intermittently till 1612, and in 1613 he was appointed Pensionary of Rotterdam, a promotion which brought him into close contact and intimacy with John Barneveld, the famous Grand Pensionary of Holland. Already in 1609 he had published his remarkable work Mare Liberum, an expansion of part of the treatise De Jure Praedae, which for politic reasons remained unpublished during his lifetime. A visit to England in 1613 as a delegate to discuss and settle the Greenland Fishery Dispute was void of satisfaction to the Dutch, but Grotius was received with much honour by James I., and Casaubon, then resident in London, testified to his " divine genius," " profound learning," and " sincere piety." So far it had been roses, roses all the way, but the tide of fortune turned with disastrous sudden- ness. The trouble was theological in its origin, having grown out of the Arminian controversy, but the ultimate issue was Consti- tutional. Grotius, as a humane and moderate man, naturally gravitated towards the camp of the Arminian, whose Remon- strance, which in turn provoked the contra-Remonstrance of the Gomarists or ultra-Calvinists, seems to us remarkably mild. But it was one of the strange ironies of fate that the Dutch, welded into iron unity by Spanish oppression, were convulsed and shattered by intestine discord over the interpretation of the doctrines of Election and Predestination. Stranger still was it to find Louis XIII. of France in vain appealing through his Ambassadors ordinary and extraordinary to the Dutch to compose their differ- ences in a spirit of toleration. Groans was never an extreme partisan in anything, and he undoubtedly strove to promote fusion and concord. But the geographical distribution of Conformity and Dissent played into the hands of Prince Maurice, the Military Chief of the Netherlands, who had cast in his lot with the Gomarists, • Hugo Grotius, the Father of the Modern Science of International Law. By Hamilton Vreeland, jun., LL.B., Ph.D., of the New York Bar. London : Oxford University Prem. 110s. net.'
and had long owed John Barneveld a grudge ; the deadlock over the appointment of a Synod brought up the question of State rights and the maintenance of local forces, or Waartgelders. With the majority of the Provinces at his back, Prince Maurice struck hard and promptly, and arrested the three chief Remonstrants, Barneveld, Grotius, and Hoogerbects ; after a trial which violated the elementary principles of justice and was conducted very much on the lines of that of Miss Cavell, the first was sent to the scaffold and the other two condemned to perpetual imprisonment in 1619. Barneveld was an old man and worn out by his labours, but he was too proud to plead for mercy for himself, though profoundly anxious that Grotius, " that great rising light, still young," might be spared to do the land great service. In his last words from the scaffold he bade the burghers remember that he did not die for treason, but " for the maintenance of the liberty and the laws of the country." The long self-exculpatory letter addressed to the Prince by Grotius strikes a very different note. It is throughout a plea for pardon on the ground that the writer had not been a free agent, but had acted in accordance with the will of his masters, to whom he had taken oath ; that he had even given dissatisfaction to his colleagues by his conciliatory advice. The references to Barneveld are un- sympathetic and critical. Even Mr. Vreeland admits that the defence of Grotius showed selfishness, and bids us remember that Barneveld was an old man whose life was run, while Grotius's greatest work remained to be done. In his captivity in the gloomy fortress of Loevestein, which lasted for nearly two years, Grotius showed patience and fortitude and found consolation in study. His wife and children shared his imprisonment, and the story of his escape shut up in a book-chest, while giving us a fine picture of his endurance and tenacity, reveals Mme. de Groot as a heroine of the highest and most self-sacrificing quality. And the resource- fulness of the faithful servant-girl who went with the chest to Gorcum is hardly less splendid. It is indeed a thrilling story, and Mr. Vreeland tells it right well.
From Antwerp Grotius made his way to France, and was received with honour by the King and all the leading states- men and men of learning in France. Louis granted him a pension of 3,000 Evros, as well as his personal protection, and Mme. de Groot, who had nobly remained at the fortress to face the Governor, soon rejoined her husband. In view of his European reputa- tion, many Powers sought to retain his services, but he declined all these offers until the year 1634, when he accepted the office of Ambassador to Sweden, which he faithfully discharged for ten years. He visited Sweden just before his death in 1645, and was handsomely treated and rewarded by Queen Christina, but persisted in his resolve to resign his post, being wearied by the intrigue of negotiations. The honour and esteem in which he was held in Paris never compensated him for the implacable ingratitude of his country. Moreover, his pension was always in arrears ; and he was too honourable, honest, and scrupulous a man to make head against antagonistic influences. His great work De Jure Belli ac Pace, dedicated to Louis XIII., was published in June, 1625, and through- out his sojourn in France his pen was seldom idle. The character that emerges from these pages inspires admiration tempered with compassion. Grotius had a great and wide-ranging intellect fortified by immense learning. It was his misfortune that, harbour- ing a noble vision of international peace to be achieved by arbitra- tion, he stood practically alone among the active diplomatists of his age in his ideals, and that his natural kindliness and moderation inclined him to a certain opportunism in the world of realities. He was capable of great personal sacrifices, but he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. In his lifetime it might have been said of him laudatur et alget. But the torch that he lit has never been extinguished.
Mr. Vreeland has done his work very well, but his scholarship is not above reproach. Some of the Latin quotations do not seem correctly transcribed, and the " Strobaeus " repeatedly referred to is, we suppose, Stobaeus.
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