The existence of a significant relationship between the concept of the balance of power and international law would be regarded as improbable by most modern international lawyers. They would think of the balance as a wholly obsolete conception and, in any case, as a part of international policy, or worse, part of cynical Realpolitik rather than of law. Earlier generations of jurists, however, did see international equilibrium either as an integral part of the system of rules of the law of nations or at least as a necessary precondition to the existence of such a law. Such a view of the interrelationship was never unanimous; indeed, there were in the past many legal observers who saw the balance of power as an obstacle to the development of an international legal order based on something more moral than force alone. This article is devoted to a study of the relationships between those two concepts as seen by the publicists who created the corpus of international law, principally during the period from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is not a study of the balance of power at large—a topic to which volumes might be dedicated—but only of that idea’s relationship with law.

The private fortunes of great men form a subject usually neglected by their biographers. The more idolizing the biographer, the less apt he is to consider it, as if such a hero's fortune were a partie honteuse in his life. In Bismarck's case, the forms and size of his fortune and the ways he acquired it, matters about which he himself was never reticent, were the object of hostile contemporary pamphleteering and much gossip then and later among friends and foes, high and low, princes and underlings.

The progress, Spatial and otherwise, from limited and local state systems, in Italy, Europe, the Western hemisphere, to a world-wide system and world politics, Weltpolitik, has been accompanied by a progress in Weltangst, to use a term of German existential philosophy. Much of grosse Politik, so-called, is conditioned, if not driven by grandes peurs, several of which, if one were to undertake a genealogy of fears and anxieties, would prove far from new (“Yellow Peril,” etc.), and so are domestic politics. Both are anxiety-affected—in the extreme: anxiety-driven—fields.

Twice within 25 years, in 1919 and again in 1944–5, the idea of the balance of power hasbeen pronounced dead, and twice it has arisen from its seeming demise soon after such funereal exercises. Foremost among the obituaries were those of American statesmen, like Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull. When the latter returned from conferences in Moscow in the autumn of 1943, he stated, as if he were the true heir of Wilsonism, that “as the provisionsof the fournations declarations are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security.”

Once they are complete and established beyond doubt, casualty data make possible some measurement of war. Battle losses not only permit us to say what the price in lives and limbs paid by one side for victory as a whole or for a specific victory has been, or the cost of defeat for the losing side, but also to estimate the comparative efficiency of the two opposing sides.

There is a decided trend toward youth and the revaluation of youth in modern war. It is observable in recent appointments to high posts of command in armies and navies, while one entire arm of combat, aviation, is now closed not only to old but even mature men. The dive bomber is the new counterpart to those early-mediaeval “Junkers” or “young masters” who won their spurs at sixteen. Listening to the pressing calls for rejuvenation, indeed, one might think that war today, as at sometime in the past, has been handed back to youth.