276
Adams Lecture on the War with China.
MAY,
for ever: and forty years after, in 1493, Alexander VI., the Nero of the papal tiara, the year after the discovery by Christopher Columbus of the western hemis phere, did in like manner give and grant the same hemisphere to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. This was about twenty-five years before the publication of the thirty-five theses of Martin Luther at the university of Wittenberg. That was the law of nations between Christian communities of that day. Since the protes. tant reformation, the power of the pope to distribute kingdoms at his pleasure is hardly an article of the law of nations, even among Catholic communities. Yet even now there is a law of nations between Roman Catholics, strictly confined to them, and which is of no validity for any other portion of the human race.
There is also a law of nations between Christian communities, which prevails between the Europeans and their descendants throughout the globe. This is the law recognized by the constitution of the United States, as obligatory upon them in their intercourse with European states and colonies. But we have a separate and different law of nations for the regulation of our intercourse with the Indian tribes of our own continent. Another law of nations between us and the woolly- headed natives of Africa—another with the Barbary powers and the sultan of the Ottoman empire-a law of nations with the inhabitants of the isles of the sea, wherever human industry and enterprise have explored the geography of the globe; and lastly, a law of nations with the flowery land, the celestial empire, the Man- tchou-Tartar dynasty of despotism, where the patriarchal system of sir Robert Fil- mer flourishes in all its glory. And this is the heathen nation with which the im- perial Christian realm of Great Britain and Ireland, is waging a war, in which all or many others of the Christian nations of the earth, and among the rest our United States of America, are in imminent danger of being involved.
The law of nations then, by which the right and wrong of the present contest is to be tried, is, as between the parties themselves, the general and necessary law of nations, but as it may effect the other Christian nations whose rights are involv. ed in the issue, it is the Christian law of nations which must furnish the principles for discussion.-It may be necessary to remember this distinction.
By the law of nature, the rights of property result from two sources, occu- pancy and labor-occupancy gives possession, and confers the exclusive right to its fruits-but possession is either temporary or permanent. It may be exclusive or common. Possession may be permanently maintained of that which can be carried about with the person. The occupancy of the soil to give the right to the soil must be permanent, at least for a season; to be permanent, it must be divid- ed by metes and bounds; and this can be effected only by agreement. The right of property being thus established by labor, by occupancy, and by compact, the right of exchange, barter, or in other words of commerce, necessarily follows. If the state of nature between men is a state of peace, and the pursuit of happiness is a natural right of man's, it is the duty of man to contribute as much as is in his power to one another's happiness. This is emphatically enjoined by the Christian precept to love your neighbor as yourself; now there is no other way by which men can so much contribute to the comfort and well-being of one another as by commerce or mutual exchanges of equivalents. Commerce is then among the natural rights and duties of men—and if of individuals, still more of communities, for as by the law of nature every man, though he love his neighbor as himself, inust provide for his own preservation and that of his family, before he can minis- ter to the wants of his neighbor, it follows that he can give in exchange, to his
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