The Law of Nations

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 127, 28 November 1941, Page 4

The Law of Nations

T is comforting@to have the assurance of a Cambridge professor of the subject that the law of nations still exists. But it is a littlé surprising. What most of us expect from international law is international order, in short peace, and when we look about us we see not merely no peace, but no respect for those things on which peace is basedthe sanctity of treaties, the customs and conventions of civilisation, the freedom of the human body and of the human mind. We may not have moved so rapidly into anarchy as some of us expected when the war began, but the few rags of decency we still cling to are retained with difficulty, and it was international gangsterism that exploded : the powder to begin with. But in spite of all these signs Professor Winfield insists in The Foundations and the Future of International Law, a little book that has just reached us from the Cambridge University Press, that although there is no prompt and certain punishment at present for breaches of international law, the law itself still holds, and is widely observed. He of course points out before he commits himself too far that international law, like the law of individual States, is concerned primarily with peaceful pursuits. Just as life for most of us is not " one long orgy of crime," so the life of nations is not one long story of war. International law prevents the outbreak of war to some extent; it regulates war once it does break out; and even in the present relapse into barbarism it has retained its influence more than most people imagine. So far as we are concerned in New Zealand international law has been most successful in securing reasonable treatment of prisoners. But Professor Winfield makes it clear that it has also operated with some success in protecting the property both of belligerents and of neutrals, that Prize Courts still decide the fate of merchant vessels captured at sea, that it has so far kept gas out of the war, and given status to home guards and guerillas. His real purpose, however, has been to convince ordinary men and their rulers — but ordinary men first--that international law is so necessary to civilisation that even the brigand states do not dare to flout it altogether, and that it will one day be as effective relatively between nation and nation as internal law normally is between citizen and citizen,