CHAPTER II. FARTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW. IN prosecuting our inquiries in International Law, we do not embrace the rules of general morality or ethics, by which the conduct of mankind, whether as individuals or as nations, may or ought to be governed. We confine our investigation entirely to the rules of coercive or compulsory justice, to the juridical or legal relations of nations, to those rules for the conduct of nations to each other, of which the observance may, in consistency with the principles of justice, reciprocity, and general expediency, be compelled by physical force. Some ingenious and acute Continental, particularly German, philosophers and lawyers, however, dispute the distinction here made, and deny the existence of any law of nations properly so called-that is, coercive or compulsory law, or of anything more than the morality or ethics of nations; because separate independent nations have no superior on earth to whom they are responsible or amenable; because they acknowledge no supreme legislative power, and have, in relation to each other, no Gesetzgebung, no legislative enactments, and no guarantee, or means of enforcing such enactments. But the conclusion here deduced does not appear to us, by any means, to follow from the premises. It is quite true that, according to the arrangement which the omnipotent and all-wise Creator has established on this earth, separate and independent states, or men congregated into communities, living in civil society, under a government, and occupying a definite territory, have no superior on this globe, are not subject to any supreme power, legislative or executive and administrative, and do not externally possess over, or in relation to each other, those sanctions, guarantees, or means of enforcement which internally the united power of the great majority of the nation or community, the state or government, possesses over its citizens or subjects. But it is equally true that, by the arrangement which He has made in this physical material, and physical mental world, the omnipotent and all-wise Creator has established certain laws, most of which men must obey, many of which they may transgress, but not with impunity; and to which laws generally their welfare, even in the present life, requires them to conform, in the exercise of the delegated power conferred on them. Mankind, considered in their collective capacity as nations, communities, or states, as well as in their individual capacity, are manifestly capable of rights which they are entitled to enforce, and susceptible of obligations which they are bound to perform or fulfil. Nor are these national rights and obligations left entirely without the means of compulsory enforcement: with regard to these means, sometimes denominated, though not very correctly, guarantees or sanctions, there is no doubt a considerable difference between external or international law, and the internal public or constitutional law, and the internal private jurisprudence of states. The guarantees or sanctions of international law are more slender, more feeble, than those of public or conmuch more insecure than those of stitutional law, and internal private law. But this difference does not affect or alter the essence or nature of the right or law. It is, in a great measure, the consequence of the less advanced state of the cultivation of the juridical relations of nations, which might obviously be greatly promoted by the establishment of proper and improved tribunals or courts of international law, judiciously constructed, and wisely and impartially directed or conducted, in a similar way to that in which internally, in states, the common consuetudinary law is improved and matured. The want of such more powerful guarantees or sanctions, as belong to internal private civil law, or to the internal criminal law of states, does not at all take from the fundamental rules of international law their character of judicial or legal principles. And beside war, the last to be resorted to, of the means of enforcing it, the law of nations, like the internal civil and criminal law of states, has sanctions or guarantees, partly in the reciprocal interests and in the reciprocal fears of states and governments, partly in the political alliances of the weaker with the more powerful nations, or in the maintenance of national independence, through the balance of power. Farther, in prosecuting our inquiries into the law of nations, thus limited and defined, we do not assume or proceed upon any fictitious data, or any imaginary compact among all nations, or, at least, all civilised nations, which never existed, and perhaps could not exist, or upon any supposed antecedent state of nature, whether of war or of peace, such as the hypotheses of Hobbes and Rousseau. We endeavour to ascertain international |