Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/193

Rh stract maxims of right and wrong, but to precedents, to established customs, and to the authority of the learned.

The intimate alliance, however, thus established between the Law of Nature and the conventional Law of Nations, has been on the whole attended with fortunate effects. In consequence of the discussions concerning questions of justice and of expediency which came to be blended with the details of public law, more enlarged and philosophical views have gradually presented themselves to the minds of speculative statesmen; and, in the last result, have led, by easy steps, to those liberal doctrines concerning commercial policy, and the other mutual relations of separate and independent states, which, if they should ever become the creed of the rulers of mankind, promise so large an accession to human happiness.

3. Another idea of Natural Jurisprudence, essentially distinct from those hitherto mentioned, remains to be considered. According to this, its object is to ascertain the general principles of justice which ought fo be recognized in every municipal code; and to which it ought to be the aim of every legislator to accommodate his institutions. It is to this idea of Jurisprudence that Mr Smith has given his sanction in the conclusion of his Theory of Moral Sentiments; and this he seems to have conceived to have been likewise the idea of Grotius, in the treatise de Jure Belli et Pacis.

“It might have been expected,” says Mr Smith, “that the reasonings of lawyers upon the different imperfections and improvements of the laws of different countries, should have given occasion to an inquiry into what were the natural rules of justice, independent of all positive institution. It might have been expected, that these reasonings should have led them to aim at establishing a system of what might properly be called Natural Jurisprudence, or a theory of the principles which ought to run through, and to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. But, though the reasonings of lawyers did produce something of this kind, and though no man has treated systematically of the laws of any particular country, without intermixing in his work many observations of this sort, it was very late in the world before any such general system was thought of, or before the philosophy of laws was treated of by itself, and without regard to the particular institutions of any nation. Grotius seems to have been the first who attempted to give the world anything like a system of those principles which ought to run through, and be the foundation of the laws of all nations; and his Treatise of the Laws of Peace and War, with all its imperfections, is perhaps, at this day, the most complete work that has yet been given on the subject.”

Whether this was, or was not, the leading object of Grotius, it is not material to decide; but if this was his object, it will not be disputed that he has executed his design in a very desultory manner, and that he often seems to have lost sight of it altogether, in the midst