Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/622

604, opportunity is presented for all sorts of logical conflict as to the import of the previous cases cited in illustration, or as to the value of the analogies insisted upon.

In other words, a series of logical processes is involved in the interpretation of every law, whether written or unwritten, and the correctness of these processes may furnish ground for indefinite doubt and argument. But these logical processes are permanent and universal, and the application of them to the interpretation of law imparts their own permanence and universality to the Science of Law.

It has thus been seen that the intellectual and the ethical nature of man in all nations tends to impart a scientific character to the study of the laws by which his social actions are regulated. The physical facts of his life and bodily constitution tend to the same end. His birth, his death, his age, his liability to diseases and accidents of all sorts, his capacity of locomotion, and his several relations to time, space, quantity, measurement, and the like, further discover fresh categories into which portions of the laws which regulate his conduct, and describe his situation, under varying circumstances, in relation to his fellows, necessarily fall.

Besides the elements of the Science of Law which are discoverable within the limits of a single state, and even of the most miniature one, there are others which are. developed only in the course of time, as states multiply in number, and as their relations to one another become strictly defined.

The relations of states to one another are twofold in character. Either the governments of the different states have relations to each other, or the individual citizens of the different states have relations to each other.

The first class of relations gives occasion to what is called Public International Law, and the latter to what is sometimes called, with less precision. Private International Law.

It is plain that, if the rules regulating the relations of states are true law in any sense, they are identical for all the states subject to them. The same ought to be the case with respect to the rules regulating the recognition of the laws of foreign states. But there are certain obstacles which have, in fact, prevented the uniformity of substance which might have been anticipated in this region of law.

The rules of the species of law last indicated come into being through the moral claim that is presented either by persons who, not being citizens of a given country, come to the courts of justice of that country, while sojourning there, to have rights recognized and protected which they have acquired in their own country; or by those who, being citizens of one country, but having acquired rights while sojourning in other countries, come to the courts of their own country to have those rights recognized and protected.

On every occasion for inventing rules applicable to these cases, the