WORKS OF MAJOR-GEN. GEORGE B. DAVIS PUBLISHED BY JOHN WILEY & SONS, Inc. A Treatise on the Military Law of the United Together with the Practice and Procedure of The Elements of Law. An Introduction to the Study of the Constitutional and Military Law of the United States. 8vo, v +188 pages, cloth, $2.50 net. ON THE MILITARY LAW OF THE UNITED STATES. TOGETHER WITH THE PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE OF COURTS- BY MAJOR-GENERAL GEORGE B. DAVIS, Late Judge-Advocate General, U. S. A.; Late Professor of Law at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N. Y. STANFOR THIRD EDITION, REVISED. TOTAL ISSUE FIVE THOUSAND NEW YORK JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1913, BY GEORGE B. DAVIS. 251122 PRESS OF BROOKLYN, N. Y. L INTRODUCTION. THE history of the constitutional military establishment of England, the country from which our own institutions are in great part derived, has hardly received the attention to which, by its interest and importance, it is fairly entitled. The gradual development of the common law and the study of that great body of maxims and fundamental principles which we call the English Constitution have been made the subject of minute and painstaking inquiry; the corresponding development of the military institutions of the kingdom, however, have been less carefully studied, and this notwithstanding the fact that the long controversy between the sovereign and Parliament, extending over more than three quarters of a century, which culminated in the Great Revolution of 1688, had to do not only with the discussion and settlement of disputed questions connected with the maintenance of the military establishment and the discipline of the military forces, but involved as well the relation of the military to the civil power, and the place of the former in the constitutional law of the kingdom. It may be safely asserted that for the two centuries immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest the place assigned to military law was in no sense inferior to that occupied by the common law. Indeed it was not until the feudal system had begun to decline in England that the latter began to predominate, and gradually to absorb the civil jurisdiction formerly exercised by the courts of the constable and marshal; and this absorption of jurisdiction was due less, perhaps, to the superior excellence of the common law than to the fact that the kingdom was at peace with the continental states, and that there were but few occasions for the employment of military forces on foreign service or in foreign wars. The Hundred Years' War for dominion in France, in so far as it affected the interests of the English people, was a foreign war, carried on upon foreign territory, and as such gave rise to no conflict of jurisdiction between. the civil and military tribunals, but rather afforded to each form of jurisprudence an opportunity for normal and appropriate development. This was especially true of military law. Articles or Ordinances of War were |