The Nature and the Future of International Law1

Returning, in the early days of the war, from a belligerent Germany, through a mobilized Switzerland and a partly mobilized Italy, to an America that was still unperturbed and unprepared, I revisited the famous Museum of Naples. In one of the central corridors, I noticed an ancient mural inscription, which I had doubtless seen before without appreciating its significance—an inscription of the time of Augustus: “To perpetual peace.” Thus even in warlike Rome, and more than nineteen centuries ago, after a series of wars that had shaken the then civilized world from the Alps to the African deserts and from the Pillars of Hercules to the Nile, as after every great war that has since devastated Europe, men's minds were turning with inextinguishable hope to the vision of a warless future.