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intend to establish peace and justice among all

nations.

Article 10th. The ships of each contracting party shall sail under their respective national flags, and they shall not use any foreign flag on the high seas.

We have now given a general formula for treaties among Christian nations with a view to carry into effect the benign principles of the moral law of nations. These articles exhibit both the practicability and equity of our system. If all Christian nations would adopt them, stability and prosperity would crown the glorious movement, and national interest would be found inseperably connected with the performance of national duties. National duty and national felicity would then go hand in hand, wars would cease or rarely occur, peace and plenty would prevail, free and reciprocal commerce would bind the happy nations of Christendom into one great family reposing upon the celestial principles of the Gospel, and all acknowledging the supreme law of the King of kings.

In Europe and America the minds of statesmen begin to be enlightened by the day-spring from on high, and the folly and wickedness of wars are continually denounced on both sides of the Atlantic. The slaughter of more than five millions of human victims in Europe within half a century

upon the pagan altars of Mars has shocked the moral sense of all Christian nations, and with one

voice they demand some mode of preserving peace.

practicable and sure They seek the bless

ings of peace and industry, they desire to see the waving harvests and the fruitful fields smiling in the radiant light and glowing dew-drops of heaven, and to hear the song of the reaper and the joyous sounds of cheerful husbandry and comTo advance the golden age of Christianity, when the precepts of the Gospel shall be the acknowledged law of nations as well as of individ uals, is the aim of our system of international law.

merce.

SECTION FORTY-FIFTH.

SUMMARY OF GENERAL PRIN

CIPLES.

The result of our investigation of a code of moral law of nations leads us to the precepts of the Gospel as its true basis. The fundamental compact of the Holy Alliance, concurred in by the Christian sovereigns of Europe, and the Farewell Address of Washington, agree to this proposition. Our code then ought to be deemed the true law of nations.

Our explanation of the freedom of the seas, of the right of a neutral flag to protect all persons and property on board, except enemies, combatant in actual service and strict contraband of war,

and of the right of all neutrals to trade without interruption to and from the ports of any belligerent, and of the exclusive jurisdiction of every nation over its own vessels on the high seas, is supported by the treaty of Utretcht, by which in 1713, Great Britain and France proclaimed our doctrines to the world as fundamental principles of international law. The continental system of France, put forth in the Berlin and Milan decrees, and sustained by the leading continental nations, was a reassertion of the liberal and just doctrines of the treaty of Utretcht, which Great Britain was laboring to overthrow by her great navy, in order to engross the trade of the world and to establish a British municipal jurisdiction over the high seas. This celebrated project rightfully extended the immunity of private property and persons to the just limit assigned by sound ethics, by reason and equity. It assigned to war the same limitations with respect to private property at sea as on land. Such is the doctrine of President Adams and of our Prussian treaty. The armed neutrality of 1780, the principles of which were avowed by most of the Christian nations of Europe, was a new ratification of the noble and free doctrines of the treaty of Utretcht. Our treaty with France in 1800 is to the same effect. Such are the national sanctions of our rules of international law in favor

of free trade and of the freedom of the seas. As we have shown above, these doctrines are sanctioned by American statesmen.

The section of our code, affirming the right of bordering nations to the free navigation of navigable rivers, is sanctioned by the application of the rule to the German rivers by the allied sovereigns at Vienna in 1815, by our treaty with Britain of 1783, in reference to the free navigation of the Mississippi, while Spain owned both banks of the river from latitude 31 north to the Gulf of Mexico, by our subsequent treaty with Spain to the same effect, and by the treaty of Tilsit between Prussia and France, declaring the Vistula free to Prussia, Saxony and Dantzic.

The section which asserts the free navigation of straits, rests upon manifest equity, upon the treaty of Adrianople between Russia and Turkey, and upon the treaty between our republic and the Ottoman Porte, the former declaring the canal or strait from the Mediterranean to the Euxine or Black Sea free to the merchant ships of all nations, and the latter securing forever to American citizens that right. The treaty of Washington, between Great Britain and our republic of 1842, applied this principle to the several passes in the canal or straits called rivers, St. Clair and Detroit connecting lakes Huron and Erie.

As to expatriation our doctrine rests on the selfevident truth that all men are born free, and upon the sanction of French and American law.

It is unnecessary to recapitulate all the principles of the moral law of nations, which we suppose to have been satisfactorily illustrated. A brief enumeration of those, which relate to the freedom and security of states and of all mankind, to the freedom of navigable rivers to bordering nations, to the freedom of the seas and certain leading international rights and duties will be sufficient to exhibit the result of our labors. By the light of right reason we have shown that all men are born free and are of natural right entitled to withdraw their allegiance from the land of their birth, and become citizens of any foreign state according to the laws thereof, or may colonize any unappropriated lands of any wild region and form a new nation; that the people of every nation possesses the inalienable, inherent right of self-government with an exclusive jurisdiction over its territory, including a maritime curtilage to nations bordering the seas to be ascertained by taking stations a marine league seaward fom the extreme head lands of the coast and connecting them by straight lines deflected outward, if necessary, to keep them at any points a marine league from the coast; that all the waters and fisheries within such

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