In the month of June, 1946, the fourth centenary of Franciscus de Vitoria was celebrated at Salamanca before a concourse of theologians and lawyers and scholars from all parts of the world.

Relatively speaking, one imagines that the name of Franciscus de Vitoria means more to the world today than it did at the date of his first or his second or his third centenary. In these last years, men of many lands, one may say men of all the lands, have come to acknowledge the debt that international law owes to him as its first founder. Years ago Holland, the birthplace of Grotius, made handsome acknowledgment; as France has done, and Italy too; and all the Americas. On 23rd December, 1933, the Seventh International Conference of American States, passed a resolution ‘that a bust of the Spanish theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, be placed in the headquarters of the Pap-Ameriean Union in Washington, as a tribute to the Professor of Salamanca, who, in the 16th century, established the foundations of modern International Law’.

In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the good Doctor is said to have spoken with great emotion these words: ‘I love the University of Salamanca ; for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful’. At the celebrations of 1946, in Salamanca, Dr Brierly the distinguished professor of International Law of the University of Oxford attended. His acknowledgment, and the acknowledgment of Dr Johnson, go not only for Oxford but also for England.

The great Dominican Order of which St Thomas Aquinas is the finest flower may still be, in the minds of many Englishmen, ‘in a special way associated with the Inquisition in Spain. It may therefore come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the work of Francisco de Vitoria, to learn that it was a Spanish Dominican, who died four hundred years ago, who was in his day Europe’s foremost champion of the rule of international law and of human rights. Of Basque origin, Vitoria was an active university teacher at the violent epoch when the Spaniards, having defeated the Moors at home, were founding their American colonies. Vitoria's opinions commanded wide attention among his contemporaries; so much so, that his idealism incurred for him considerable opposition in powerful governmental circles at a time when interests and passions combined to obscure impartial thinking on international affairs.

It may be instructive, in what follows, to compare some of Vitoria’s principles (as set out and expounded in the collections of his works produced and introduced by J. B. Scott for the Carnegie Endowment for international peace) with the principles now to be found in the United Nations Charter, the latest constructive attempt to create an international order.

No doubt the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, when Vitoria was young, was an event just as stupefying as the discovery of the atomic bomb is to us. The mariner’s astrolobe of 1480 may be compared with the cyclotron of today. Neither of these wonders has prevented international lawyers from facing the future and applying their principles to new problems and unthought-of circumstances.

Without falling into the detestable errors of racialism, we can say that national cultures enshrine, at least in a measure, qualities both good and bad truly characteristic of the nation. Thus we may see in Spanish history, literature and art, a great emphasis on man’s natural dignity, an emphasis which at times passes from virtue to vice in the pride which is at present so curiously insisted on by some who pretend to a special understanding of things Spanish. The great Spaniard, Francisco de Vitoria, although far from approving an unhealthy national pride, does in fact bring out very clearly that man, by his own proper nature, is invested with a dignity which is involved in the moral consideration of the most diverse activities.

In his day the Spanish tendency to boasting—pilloried in the Rodomontades—had real and marvellous achievements to rest on, and the reconquest of Christian Spain was at last an accomplished deed. Moralists and theologians were imbued with a feeling for man’s greatness. Vitoria in particular was concerned in his thought with the dignity of man as such, rather than man as Spaniard. In the Relectio de Indis he brings out most clearly that the treatment of barbarians must be governed by what is worthy of man in himself. Nothing does so much credit to Spanish culture as that, even while the baroque style in sentiment and manners was elaborating its less admirable features—ostentatious display, excess of pride, of panache, and the absurdities of pundonor—Spain could still produce a man like Vitoria whose simplicity, austerity, and firm adherence to principle give us the Spanish feeling for dignity in its best form, as expressed by gravedad.