214
Adams Lecture on the War with China.
MAY,
ART. III. Lecture on the War with China, delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society, December, 1841 By the hon. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS of Mass., U. s. A. Extracted from an Ame- rican paper.
THE existing state of the relations between the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the empire of China, opens for discussion questions of deep interest to the whole human race; and of pre-eminent interest to the people of the North American union. Great Britain and China are at war. The questions which immediately rise for consideration, in this conflict between two of the mightiest nations of the globe, are--
1. Which of the two parties to the contest has the righteous cause?
2. What are the prospects of its progress and termination?
3. How are the interests of other nations, and particularly of the United States, already, or likely to be hereafter, affected by it?
4. What are the dutics of the government and people of the United States resulting from it?
For the solution of the first of these questions, we inust resort to a statement of the facts in which the controversy originated, and for a candid application to those facts, of the laws of nature and of nations.
But before entering upon the inquiry, it may be proper to remark that an eminent French writer upon the subject of international law has contended that there can be no such thing, and he makes it a subject of grave and serious charge against the English language itself, that it applies the word law to the obligations incumbent upon nations. His argument is that law is a rule of conduct prescrib. ed by a superior—a legislator, that is, an act of government, deriving its force from sovereign authority, and binding only upon the subject. That nations, being inde. pendent, acknowledge no superior, and have no common sovereign from whom they can receive the law. That all the relative dutics between nations result from right and wrong, from conventions or compact, and from usage or custom, to neither of which can the term law be properly applied. That this system of rules had been called by the Romans the jus gentium, and in all the languages of mo. dern Europe, the right of nations, or the rights of war and peace. Upon the rigor. ous analysis of the meaning of words it must be admitted that there is much force in this objection. Law and right, we know but too well by the experience of mankind in all ages, including our own, are not convertible terms. Law necess2. rily implies coinmand on one part, and obedience on the other. Right is the gift of the Creator to man, at once the charter of his own freedom, and the law of his reverence for the same right of his fellow creature, man. In this sense right and law are convertible terms-but the law is the law of God, and the right is the right of man.
It is urged by the writer to whom I now allude, that the nations speaking the English language, by the use of this word law to express the rules of intercourse between nations, have habituated themselves to confound it with the municipal law of their own realm; and to infer that the same legislative authority which is Competent to make the laws of the land for them, is equally competent to prescribe Laws for all the nations of the earth