ed in his mind on this point, Cicero wrote as
to the obligations of veracity upon enemies in time of war, and in
repudiation of the idea that warfare included a suspension of all
moral relations between belligerents during active hostilities.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cicero's _De Officiis_, I., 12, 13.]

He said: "The equities of war are prescribed most carefully by the
heralds' law (_lex fetialis_) of the Roman people," and he went on to
give illustrations of the recognized duty of combatants to keep within
the bounds of mutual social obligations. "Even where private persons,
under stress of circumstances, have made any promise to the enemy," he
said, "they should observe the exactest good faith, as did Regulus, in
the first Punic war, when taken prisoner and sent to Rome to treat of
the exchange of prisoners, having sworn that he would return. First,
when he had arrived, he did not vote in the Senate for the return of
the prisoners. Then, when his friends and kinsmen would have detained
him, he preferred to go back to punishment rather than evade his faith
plighted to the enemy.

"In the second Punic war also, after the battle of Cannae, of the ten
Romans whom Hannibal sent to Rome bound by an oath that they would
return unless they obtained an agreement for the redemption of
prisoners, the censors kept disfranchised those who perjured
themselves, making no exception in favor of him who had devised a
fraudulent evasion of his oath. For when by leave of Hannibal he had
departed from the camp, he went back a little later, on pretense
of having forgotten something. Then departing again from the camp
[without renewing his oath], he counted himself set free from the
obligation of his oath. And so he was free _so_ far as the words went,
but not so in reality; for always in a promise we must have regard to
the meaning of our words, rather than to the words themselves."

In modern times, when Lord Clive, in India, acted on the theory that
an utter lack of veracity and good faith on the part of an enemy
justified a suspension of all moral obligations toward him, and
practiced deceit on a Bengalee by the name of Omichund, in order to
gain an advantage over the Nabob of Bengal, he was condemned by the
moral sense of the nation for which he thus acted deceitfully; and, in
spite of the specious arguments put forth by his partisan defenders,
his name is infamous because of this transaction.

"English valor and English intelligence hav