308 A Positive Century (1815–1914)1893, did international legal work, ably representing Venezuela in 1898– 99
in an arbitration against Britain over the boundary with British Guyana.
For activist roles in public life, it would be diffi cult to exceed that of
Henry W. Halleck in the United States. A graduate of West Point, his fi rst
contribution to public life was in the professionalization of military studies
(which earned him the derogatory nickname of “Old Brains”). Aft er mili-
tary ser vice in the Mexican War, he became a principal draft er of the Cali-
fornia state constitution, then a prosperous practicing lawyer and business-
man. Amid this activity, he produced his treatise on international law in
1861 and then promptly became a general in the Union armies in his coun-
try’s Civil War, rising to the post of supreme commander of the Union
forces.
Two Who Stood Out
In this period when a genuine community of international lawyers can be
said to have formed— the generation before 1914— two fi gures may be iden-
tifi ed as the most prominent: Martens and Renault. As will be observed
presently, these two were the most prominent fi gures in various interna-
tional conferences of the period, as well as in arbitrations.
Fedor Fedorovich von Martens was no relation to his German namesake
from a century earlier. He was born in Estonia to a poor Lutheran family
and orphaned at an early age but had the good fortune to attend the Univer-
sity of St. Petersburg and then to study abroad. At the University of Heidel-
berg, he attended lectures by Bluntschli, and at Vienna by Stein. Both of
these men made a great impression on the young lawyer. Aft er returning to
Rus sia, he served as legal adviser to the foreign ministry for some forty
years, from 1869 until his death in 1909. For most of that period, he doubled
as a professor of international law at the Imperial School in St. Petersburg.
In a busy professional life, he somehow found time to pen a three- volume
treatise on international law, published in 1883. A clear sign of an earnest
personality was his motto: “Labor omnia vincit” (“labor conquers all”). He
also had the remarkable distinction of being the subject of a novel in the late
twentieth century— a form of recognition without parallel in the profes-
sion. (In the course of the novel, Martens becomes briefl y transformed
into his earlier German namesake.)