Page:Two Introductory Lectures on the Science of International Law.djvu/21

 any examination of the various collections of rules, by which questions of maritime law had come to be regulated between individual members of different political communities, such as the Consolato del Mare, which was a manual of maritime law for traders in the ports of Spain and Italy, the Roles or Jugemens d’Oleron, which form the substance of the Black Book of the British Admiralty, the Laws Maritime of Wisby, which prevailed in many ports of the Baltic, and the Code of the Hanse League; I merely allude to them thus briefly, lest I should be supposed to have overlooked their existence in connection with a department of the law of nations. They were certainly most important contributions to the maritime branch of that law; and whilst the intercourse of nations was confined to maritime commerce they supplied rules, founded upon usage, to meet the necessities of the questions which had hitherto arisen, or were thought likely to arise. Their great value was, that they cast into a permanent type and placed on record the usage of nations in certain matters, and brought mankind to respect that general usage as constituting a rule to which individuals, without respect to nationalities, were required to conform. They practically prepared the way for the admission of the legal doctrine which Hooker had foreshadowed in the first book of his Ecclesiastical Polity. “The Law of Nations,” he writes is a [“]third kind of law, which toucheth all such several bodies political, so far forth as one of them hath public commerce with another. The strength and virtue of that law is such that no particular nation can prejudice the same by any their several laws and ordinances, more than a man by his private resolutions the laws