Germans are so strenuously contending, is wholly imaginary. Fifty years ago another continent was riven with war, and there was much talk of what a neutral might do, and might not do; and there appeared in _The Times_ a series of letters signed ‘Historicus,’ in which, among other things, the elementary principles of neutrality were very strenuously and very lucidly set forth. Very strenuously, for there was a certain M. Hautefeuille who had filled the world--like the Dernburgs of to-day--with much unsound doctrine. Now unsound doctrine was a thing which stirred Mr. Vernon Harcourt to the depths of his soul, and those only who have heard him know what waves of wrath surged up in his brain. He had the art of transferring to paper the billowy language he was wont to use; and as you read you hear the rotund sentences rolling onwards to swamp the frail bark of his adversary. But he had another art: of clear thinking and lucid exposition. In the series of Whewell Lectures which I attended at Cambridge in the year of grace ----, of which I still preserve my notes, he seemed to make plain the whole mystery of Public International Law. New times have produced new teachers of the old heresies; and it is good to turn once more to the pages of the ‘Letters of Historicus,’ for again the neutral nations are invited to ‘upset the whole fabric of international law which the reason of jurists has designed and the usage of nations has built up.’ To adapt his references[9] to Burke and Canning to himself, ‘I would that we had yet amongst us his multitudinous eloquence and his poignant wit to do justice upon this presumptuous sciolism’ of the German Foreign Office. The world, indeed, seems still to need his teaching. From what one hears in the market-place I gather that there is a vague feeling in the air that our case is not _quite_ so good as we should like it to be; that there is a mysterious crevice in our armour-joints through which, if not the German, at least Uncle Sam has pricked us. There is a nebulous ‘something’ about neutrality, especially about ‘neutral duties,’ which seems to preclude accurate thinking; and even the ‘Legal Correspondent’ does not always pierce the haze. So the student, in memory of an hour spent after lecture in his master’s rooms in Neville’s Court, when kindly patient, and so lucidly, he expounded to him the meaning of a difficult decision, will endeavour to weave into a continuous whole the threads of the doctrine which he taught. It is not that people do not know; only that they forget. * * * * *