Peace is their normal condition; war is the exception. The ultimate object of all modern war is a renewed state of peace. The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief. Ever since the formation and co-existence of modern nations, and ever since wars have become great national wars, War has come to be acknowledged not to be its own end, but the means to obtain great ends of state, or to consist in defence against wrong; and no conventional restriction of the modes adopted to injure the enemy is any longer admitted; but the law of war imposes many limitations and restrictions on principles of justice, faith, and honor. § 7. Military Necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of the armed enemies, and of those whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor; it allows of all destruction and obstruction of property, of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communion, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; of all appropriation necessary for the subsistence and safety of the army, and of all deception which does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist, even in the fiercest struggle, as a basis of intercourse between honorable belligerents. Men who take up arms against one another in public war, do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another, and to God. Military Necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge;—nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions; it does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the devastation of districts for the sake of creating depopulated districts, since it is the will of our Maker that in the normal state the land shall be tilled and peopled; and, in general, Military Necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult. § 8. In modern wars all civil and penal law continues to take its usual course in the enemy’s places and territories under Martial Law, unless interrupted or stopped by order of the occupying military power; but all the functions of the hostile government, legislative, executive, or administrative, whether of a general, provincial, or local character, cease under Martial Law, or continue only with the assistance or special approbation of the occupier or invader. § 9. Martial Law extends to property and persons, whether they are subjects of the enemy, or aliens to that government.