Francis Lieber —His Life and His Work: Part I

Extract

As a characteristic of contemporary civilization, history will doubtless point to the unceasing effort to establish on a solid basis the juridical organization of the world. The essential requisites are already at hand. Facility of communication, suppression of distances, the fact that the different regions are in constant communication, all of these things greatly facilitate the work. There are no longer undiscovered lands, or inaccessible countries. In the commercial and industrial world business organizations embrace all the nations of the earth. In the intellectual domain, an irresistible international movement has succeeded the narrow conceptions heretofore existing. It is especially in the domain of law that such manifestations have been shown and are still shown with an ever-increasing intensity. In the vast subject of the conflict of laws, an effort is being made to obtain uniform rules; in the subject of the law of nations not only have numerous conventions been concluded, some of which number as contracting parties practically all the states; but the application of justice has been organized, and, already, has gone beyond the phase of arbitration; there exists a true judicial court, a court which declares and decides law in its own right instead of depending upon the will of those amenable to its jurisdiction. Everything indicates that the time is close at hand when a legislative and an executive power will be established over the nations; at any rate, no one nowadays thinks of pronouncing such institutions impossible and fit to be classed with unrealizable dreams.