Page:Commentaries on American Law vol. I.djvu/19

Lecture I.] among the remains of the ancients, the virtues of humanity, liberality, and justice, towards other people, as being founded in the universal law of nature. Their ancestors, he observed, considered that man as an enemy whom they regarded merely as a foreigner, and to deny to strangers the use and protection of the city, would be inhuman. To overturn justice by plundering others, tended to destroy civil society, as well as violate the law of nature, and the institutions of Heaven; and by some of the most happy illustrations, and pathetic examples, Cicero vindicated the truth, and inculcated the value of the precept, that nothing was truly useful which was not honest. In the latter ages of the Roman empire, when their municipal law became highly cultivated, and adorned by philosophy and science, the law of nations was recognised as part of the natural reason of mankind. Quod vero naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, id apud omnet gentes perœque custoditur, vocatur que jus gentium, quasi quo jure omnes gentes utantur. The Roman law was destined to attain the honourable distinction of becoming a national guide to future ages, and to be appealed to by modern tribunals and writers, in cases in which usage and positive law were silent, as one authoritative evidence of the decisions of the law of nations.

It must be admitted, however, that the sages from whose works the pandects were compiled, speak very indistinctly and imperfectly on the subject of national law. They must be read with much discrimination, as Grotius observed, for they often call that the law of nations which prevailed, and perhaps by casual consent, among some nations only, and many things which belonged to the law of nations they treated indiscriminately with matters of mere municipal law. The Roman jurisprudence, in its most cultivated state, was a very imperfect transcript of the precepts of