de Vattel: Of the Right of Private Persons in War

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* NOW - Buy this resource online! Click here * Of the Right of Private Persons in War§ 223. Subjects cannot commit hostilities without the sovereign's order.§ 224. That order may be general or particular.§ 225. Source of the necessity of such an order.§ 226. Why the law of nations should have adopted this rule.§ 227. Precise meaning of the order.§ 228. What private persons may undertake, presuming on the sovereign's will.§ 229. Privateers.§ 230. Volunteers.§ 231. What soldiers and subalterns may do.§ 232. Whether the state is bound to indemnify the subjects for damages sustained in war.
   1. Til. Liv. lib. viii. cap. vii.
   2. Volcatius Gallicanus, quoted by Grotius, book III, chap. xviii. § i. n. 6.
   3. Lib. iii. cap. xx. § viii.
   4. It is in general the indispensable duty of every sovereign to adopt the most efficacious measures for the protection of his subjects engaged in war, in order that they may suffer by it as little as possible, instead of voluntarily exposing them to greater evils. During the wars in the Netherlands, Philip the Second prohibited the release or exchange of prisoners of war. He forbade the peasants, under pain of death, to pay any contributions with a view to purchase an immunity from pillage and conflagration; and, under the same penalty, prohibited the use of safeguards and protections. In opposition to this barbarous ordinance, the states-general adopted measures fraught with consummate wisdom. They published an edict, in which, after having described the destructive consequences of the Spanish barbarity, they exhorted the Flemings to attend to their own preservation, and threatened to retaliate on all who should obey the cruel ordinance of Philip. By such conduct they put an end to the dreadful proceedings to which it had given birth.