Let me begin with a quotation:

It is generally considered a sort of natural law in the political world for conservatives to govern and for radicals to criticize. In France the opposite is true; there the Left and Right have changed functions, as it is the former, not the latter, which controls the destinies of the nation. This is due primarily to the fact that conservatism in France has neither a habitation nor a name; for the French Revolution, by cutting the jugular vein of the inherited traditions of the country, had established revolution itself as a tradition. So completely has the radical spirit taken possession of the French people that even the reactionaries are dominated by it; for what is a coup d'état if not a revolutionary method of establishing a conservative government? The aristocratic spirit, driven from the body politic, has found refuge in literature; there French tradition still rules, unbroken and unchallenged. Anatole France, Socialist in politics, is yet the hardest and straightest of classicists and a legitimate descendant of the eighteenth century masters. France is unique in harboring at the same time the two master-spirits of aristocracy in arts and letters, and democracy in society and politics.

Revolutionary traditions have made France the protagonist of of political progress. To her history has assigned the rôle of proclaiming the newly-born thought of the world, for it is now accepted as a truism that what France thinks today the world will think tomorrow. And because new ideas always take on strange forms and speak a Quixotic language, France has been decried as fantastic when she has been only original. The history of the nation since the great Revolution has been a constant struggle between ideas and conditions.

There is no more significant commentary on the growth of international law, both in precision and in comprehensiveness, than an estimate of the relative authority of the name of Vattel in the world of international relations a century ago and in that of today. A century ago not even the name of Grotius himself was more potent in its influence upon questions relating to international law than that of Vattel. Vattel's treatise on the law of nations was quoted by judicial tribunals, in speeches before legislative assemblies, and in the decrees and correspondence of executive officials. It was the manual of the student, the reference work of the statesman, and the text from which the political philosopher drew inspiration. Publicists considered it sufficient to cite the authority of Vattel to justify and give conclusiveness and force to statements as to the proper conduct of a state in its international relations.

At the present day the name and treatise of Vattel have both passed into the remoter field of the history of international law. It is safe to say that in no modern controversy over the existence and force of an alleged rule of international law would publicists seek to strengthen the position taken by them by quoting the authority of Vattel. As an exposition of the law of nations at a given period of its growth, the work can, it is true, lose nothing of its value, but in saying that it has thus won its place irrevocably among the classics of international law, we are merely repeating that it has lost its value as a treatise on the law of the present day.