The Online Library of Liberty

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• Introduction
• A Note On the Text
• Acknowledgments
• The Rights of War and Peace Book I
• The Life of Hugo Grotius
• H. Grotius to His Most Christian Majesty Lewis XIII. King of France and Navarre.
• The Preliminary Discourse Concerning the Certainty of Right In General; and the Design of This Work In Particular.
• Book I
• Chapter I: What War Is, and What Right Is.
• Chapter II: Whether ’tis Ever Lawful to Make War.
• Chapter III: The Division of War Into Publick and Private. an Explication of the Supreme Power.
• Chapter IV: Of a War Made By Subjects Against Their Superiors.
• Chapter V: Who May Lawfully Make War.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

It is unclear whether Morrice envisaged some new edition of Grotius as a way of winning the favor of the king (not unreasonably, given that Barbeyrac had dedicated his edition to the king’s father), nor is it clear whether he in fact had any hand in the 1738 edition. (The longer autobiography goes down to 1740, but it is very sketchy about the last few years of Morrice’s life.) The notes were translated by someone with views of his own about some of the material (see, for example, II.V.14.1 n. 2), which may suggest Morrice; he died in 1740, without having received any sign of royal favor. It is likely that the 1738 edition was largely a project driven by its publishers (this is implied by the absence of a dedication, other than the translation of Grotius’s own dedication to Louis XIII), and the publishers may have recruited someone other than Morrice to translate the notes.

My own editorial remarks in the text or notes of the edition are contained within double square brackets, thus: [[.... This is because both Barbeyrac and his translator use ordinary parentheses and square brackets; the latter usually signify alterations or comments added to Grotius’ sown text, though they can also function in the same way as ordinary parentheses. Where I have introduced a footnote of my own, it is marked in the text with the symbol †. Again, this is because Barbeyrac and Grotius themselves used numbers, letters, and asterisks(*) to label their footnotes and marginal notes. Page breaks in the 1738 edition are indicated here by the use of angle brackets. For example, page 112 begins after<112>.