It inspires hope in the future to note how far this last step forward carries us away from the starting point on this line of ethical advance. At first the fate of the weaker race was extermination or slavery; then its fate was to be reduced to the condition of a tributary; still later, to be subjected to commercial and industrial exploitation by the conquering people; and lastly, to be made, in theory if not yet in actual practice, the beneficiaries of a benevolent self-sacrificing service, which finds lofty expression in Kipling’s _The White Man’s Burden_: Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need. This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted, the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than something already attained. [Sidenote: Progress in war ethics: Hugo Grotius] But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In no period of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have been lost. This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound, a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, _De Jure Belli et Pacis_, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius[775]--a work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever written not claiming divine inspiration.”[776] The aim of Grotius was not to abolish war,--he did not think universal peace an attainable ideal,--but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities, to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding. The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.[777] As the Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform of the laws of war.[778]