DUTCH kids learn at school about Hugo Grotius, a book chest and Loevestein Castle in Poederoijen near Bommel. He escaped last week, some four hundred years ago, March 22, 1621. Guards carried him out of his prison, assuming the chest was filled with books.
When the Speaker in the House of Representatives looks to the right, he, or she, sees Hugo’s image above the door. America honors him as one of the greatest jurists of all time.
Whenever America goes to fight in a foreign country somewhere, during the world wars, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, it relies on the rules of international law that Hugo Grotius wrote down after his escape.
