Page:Commentaries on American Law vol. I.djvu/16

4 form together a community of nations, united by religion, manners, morals, humanity, and science, and united also by the mutual advantages of commercial intercourse, by the habit of forming alliances and treaties with ouch other, of interchanging ambassadors, and of studying and recognising the same writers and systems of public law.

After devoting the present lecture to a cursory view of the history of the law of nations, I shall enter upon the examination of the European and American code of international law, and endeavour to collect, with accuracy, its leading principles, and to discuss their practical details.

The law of nations, as understood by the European world, and by us, is the offspring of modern times. The most refined states among the ancients seem to have had no conception of the moral obligations of justice and humanity between nations, and there was no such thing in existence as the science of international law. They regarded strangers and enemies as nearly synonymous, and considered foreign persons and property as lawful prize. Their laws of war and peace were barbarous and deplorable. So little were mankind accustomed to regard the rights of persons or property, or to perceive the value and beauty of public order, that in the most enlightened ages of the Grecian republics, piracy was regarded as an honourable employment. There were powerful Grecian states that avowed the practice of piracy; and the fleets of Athens, the best disciplined and most respectable naval force in all antiquity, were exceedingly addicted to piratical excursions. It was the received opinion, that Greeks were bound to no duties, nor by any moral law, without compact, and that prisoners taken in war had no rights, and might lawfully be put to death, or gold into perpetual slavery, with their wives and children.