for an invading army to repress, by every method within its reach, than those of taking up railway lines, destroying railway bridges, and cutting telegraph wires. Such offences have effects far more serious than the old-fashioned offences of creating impediments on roads of march, or of casually intercepting individual messengers. The whole safety of an army and the success of an expedition may be involved in the possibility of a sure reliance on rapid conveyance from point to point, or on communication being maintained hour by hour between widely removed detachments of the army.
These criticisms point to the fact that, in discussing the Defects of Laws of War. bearing of Laws of War, it must be borne in mind that (1) all imaginable Laws of War are imperfect from a purely humanitarian point of view; and however near they approach to perfection from a point of view which is at once military and humanitarian, they must, by their very nature, leave open wide gaps to be filled by the discretion of individual commanders, or the peculiar emergencies which the changing events of the War may from time to time present; that (2) the Iaws now actually in existence are very far from approaching even the degree of perfection which the philanthropist might be entitled to demand of the military Iegislator, and express, in fact, nothing more than the maximum amount of agreement which, in the present circumstances of Europe, the European States, great and small, can, in view of all the separate interests involved, or supposed to be involved, arrive at; and that (3), so far as recent experience has gone — an experience which involves wars conducted on the European continent on a wholly unprecedented scale of magnitude — the laws themselves are most imperfectly obeyed, often scandalously outraged, and, if the conflict long endure, more and more cast on one side and forgotten.
Nevertheless, with all these deductions, the existence of Laws for the mitigation of severities in War as professedly
