025 Slide – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN XXL

to be found in the castoms of their people, in the writ-
ings of their jurists and in the decisions of their
courts, so the unwritten International law is to be
found in the customs of nations, in the works of In-
ternational writers from Grotius down and in the de-
cisions of civil, criminal and prize courts. And just
as these principles have in the case of private law
heen written in statutes, so in the case of Internation-
al law have they been embodied in treaties and in the
declarations of International Congresses. Both pri-
vate and international law justify the taking of hu-
man life in certain cases, but the submarine pirate
will find no law to cover his murder of non-combatants.
He will have but the plea that he was following the
orders of a superman named the kaiser who is bound
by no law human or divine and whose anthority and
will no living creature may deny or oppose. But will
mankind bow to this?

As Dr. Wharton has put it, the conviction of Dr.
Gooper (p. 774) after those that had gone before un-
der the unpopular Sedition Law only added fresh
pungency to invectives already pungent. Cooper
shook his chains in the President’s face and dared
him to pardon him; and Lyon danced about his dun-
geon in agony, lest in a fit of clemency Mr. Adams
should secure the presidential vote of Vermont. Un-
der the Sedition Law the ‘‘seditious’? became still
more scurrilous; and the result was that the govern-
ment found itself impudently bullied by those it at-
tempted to chastise. It was reserved for later times
to demonstrate that after all a press the most unfet-
tered is a press the most restrained.

In a recent work of great interest to the lawyer*

* Decisive Battles of the Law, by Frederick Trevor Hill, New York
and London, Harper Bros., publishers. 1907.