In Full Flower 339sibility of armed confl ict between states. With some considerable justifi ca-
tion, there was optimism in the air. International law was lauded by Woolsey
as “right and humanity on a great scale.” Sometimes it seemed that opti-
mism was a de facto prerequisite for membership in the international legal
community. Oppenheim, for example, asserted that a person “is not prop-
erly fi t to work at the science of international law” if he lacks “a deep- rooted
faith in the progress of the nations towards peace and civilization.” Th ere
was a discernible trace of the contemporary ethos of “muscular Christian-
ity” in Oppenheim’s praise of international law as an “all- powerful force of
the good which pushes mankind forward.”
Th ere were inevitably those— even within the international legal
profession— who lamented that too little had been done. One of these was a
German lawyer named Walther Schücking, who was a professor at the Uni-
versity of Marburg. As a pacifi st, a po liti cal liberal, and an overt sympa-
thizer with natural law, he was far from the mainstream of his profession.
He was even something of a fi gure of ridicule. Even he, though, was a
resolute optimist, seeing the Hague conferences as the fi rst steps in a broad
movement to eventual world federation. At the same time, he regretted
the timidity of positivist lawyers, whose horizons he thought to be too nar-
row for the challenges— and opportunities— that lay ahead.
What lay ahead was cataclysmic war, in 1914– 18. International lawyers
did not start the Great War, of course. But their advice was indispensable to
the belligerent governments as Eu rope was transformed, almost overnight,
from a “house of peace” into a “house of war.” Erich Kaufmann, consistently
with his robust views on the value of war, did ser vice for Germany as a sol-
dier in the ranks. At the other end of the po liti cal and military scale, Heinrich
Lammasch, aft er being in danger of arrest early in the confl ict for pacifi st
tendencies, became minister- president of Austria at the end of the confl ict. In
that grand capacity, he had the distasteful task of advising Emperor Charles I
to abdicate his throne (Lammasch being a strong monarchist as well as a
pacifi st). Th e war time ser vice of most international lawyers lay between
these two extremes— advising governments and armed forces, exposing the
illegal ways of dastardly enemies, and so forth. Th e role of international law-
yers in the various wars of history is another of the many subjects that still
awaits a detailed treatment. Our attention will turn to a postwar world that
faced a largely new generation of international lawyers.