The Truce of God was never well observed, yet it did something during the eleventh and twelfth centuries to mitigate the evils of private war and to render life more secure and tolerable. After the twelfth century the kings of Europe, who were now strengthening their authority and consolidating their dominions, took the place of the Church in maintaining peace among their feudal vassals. They came to regard themselves as responsible for the “peace of the land,” which phrase now superseded those of the “Peace of God” and the “Truce of God.” Thus the movement to which moral forces had given the first impulse was carried to its consummation by political motives. To the Church, however, history will ever accord the honor of having begun this great reform which enforced peace upon the members of the same state, and which has made private wars in civilized lands a thing of the past. The abolition of private warfare was the first decisive step marking the advance of Europe toward universal peace. Public war, that is, war between nations, is still an established and approved institution of international law; but in the moral evolution of humanity a time approaches when public war shall also, like private war, be placed under the ban of civilization, and will have passed upon it by the truer conscience of that better age the same judgment that the conscience of to-day pronounces on that private warfare upon which the Truce of God laid the first arresting hand. [Sidenote: Progress in the ethics of war: sale into slavery of Christian captives condemned] Although the Church has done little in a direct way to abolish public war, or even directly to create in society at large a new conscience in regard to the wickedness of war in itself as an established method of settling international differences, its influence has been felt from early Christian times in the alleviation of its barbarities and cruelties. One of the first ameliorations in the rules of war effected through Christian influence concerned the treatment of war captives. Among the ancient Greeks, as we have seen, under the influence of the sentiment of Panhellenism, there was developed a vague feeling that Greeks should not enslave Greeks. But aside from this Panhellenic sentiment, which had very little influence upon actual practice, there was in the pre-Christian period seemingly little or no moral feeling on the subject, and the custom of reducing prisoners of war to slavery was practically universal.