Page:Two Introductory Lectures on the Science of International Law.djvu/10

 centuries; but the true era from which we must date the foundation of the great science, which is conversant with questions of right that concern the fellowship of nations, is the latter portion of the fifteenth century, one of the most remarkable epochs in the annals of legal science. This period has been appropriately termed by the Jesuit Andrês “the Golden Age of Jurisprudence;” and it is distinguished not merely by the completion, under the masterly hand of Cujacius, of the important work, which Alciatus of Milan had commenced in the preceding generation, of emancipating the Roman law from the verbal subtleties of the scholastic philosophy and the conflicting glosses of the earlier commentators, but also by the first systematic enunciation of rules, to which the intercourse of independent nations should be amenable.

No writer had hitherto treated expressly of that branch of jurisprudence, which was formally expounded in the following century under the novel head of the Law of Nations and of Nature. For the Law of Nations, in the received sense of the term, was in a great measure unknown to antiquity, and is not to be confounded with the Jus Gentium of the Roman Law. The Jus Gentium of the Romans was not a body of rules regulating the mutual intercourse of nations, but was that portion of Natural Law to which all mankind does homage, the least as feeling its beneficence, the greatest as not exempt from its control, and which has accordingly been incorporated into the domestic code of every nation. The earliest formal definition of this branch of law is to be found in the Institutes of Gaius, which were restored to light by the researches of Niebuhr within the last half century from amidst the archives of the Chapter