Of Spiders and Bees 199in 1785 in Latin— the last major occasion, incidentally, in which that vener-
able tongue was employed in international legal writing. Th e second and
subsequent editions were in French, as Précis du droit des gens moderne de
l’Eu rope (Summary of the Modern Eu ro pe an Law of Nations). It was trans-
lated into En glish in 1795 by the prominent British journalist and contro-
versialist William Cobbett. A German edition fi nally appeared in 1796. Th is
book, like Vattel’s, was designed to serve a practical function— in his case,
for use in a university course on politics and diplomacy.
From the outset, Martens insisted on a fundamental distinction in law
that was importantly diff erent from that of his pre de ces sors in the Grotian
tradition. Th is was the distinction between rules of law, on the one hand,
and rules of morality or conscience, on the other. He credited Kant with the
initial insight. Th e diff erence, in brief, was that rules of law are imposed
from the outside by some kind of authority, whereas rules of morality are
self- devised. Martens’s own interest was on the law side.
In general, Martens’s treatment of international law did not actually dif-
fer greatly from that of Vattel and other authors in the Grotian tradition. He
praised Vattel, along with Zouche and Textor, for off ering modern examples
to illustrate their doctrines. And he applauded Moser as the fi rst to approach
the subject systematically. Like Wolff and Vattel, he conceded that, in prin-
ciple, natural law was the same for states as for individuals— but that the ap-
plication of that law to states necessitates some adjustments and thereby gives
rise to a law of nations that diff ers from the general law of nature. It was
clear that his principal interest lay in expounding the portion of the law of
nations that was man- made—what he called “the positive, proper, par tic u-
lar and arbitrary” law applicable to relations between states. Th is law arose
from custom and from treaty practice. It was necessarily pluralistic, with
each state having its own menu of rights and duties, depending on what
agreements it had chosen to enter into with other countries. Th ere was not,
and could not be, any such thing as a universal law of nations. Th ere may be,
Martens conceded, a universal society of states— but if so, it must be a natu-
ral society (meaning one governed by natural law), and not a positive one
(governed by positive, or man- made, law).
Martens was perhaps the most explicit of the writers of this period in his
endorsement of an inductive method for his exposition. His goal, he ex-
plained, was to observe the sundry specifi c rules agreed on by a large number