The incidents of the great war now raging affect so seriously the very foundations of international law that there is for the moment but little satisfaction to the student of that science in discussing specific rules. Whether or not Sir Edward Carson went too far in his recent assertion that the law of nations has been destroyed, it is manifest that the structure has been rudely shaken. The barriers that statesmen and jurists have been constructing laboriously for three centuries to limit and direct the conduct of nations toward each other, in conformity to the standards of modern civilization, have proved too weak to confine the tremendous forces liberated by a conflict which involves almost the whole military power of the world and in which the destinies of nearly every civilized state outside the American continents are directly at stake.