CHAPTER VI.

EXTINCTION OF A STATE.

CXXIV. A STATE, like an individual, may die; its corporate capacity may be extinguished, its body politic may perish, though the individual members of it may survive.

CXXV. It ceases to exist when the physical destruction of all its members takes place, or when they all migrate into another territory-events scarcely to be contemplated as possible in the present times-or when the social bond is loosed, which may happen either by the voluntary or compulsory incorporation of the nation into another sovereignty, or by its submission, and the donation of itself, as it were, to another country. On the happening of any of these contingencies (a), a State becomes, instead of a distinct and substantive body, the subordinate portion of another society. The incorporation of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland into Great Britain; of Normandy, Brittany, and other provinces into France, are among the most familiar historical instances which illustrate this proposition. To these may now be added the kingdom of Italy, composed of States which have sought to be incorporated in her; and of Prussia, which has by force of arms possessed herself of her weaker neighbours' territories.

(a) Vattel, 1. i. c. xvi. 194. Heffters, b. i. s. 24. Klüber, pt. i. c. i. s. 23. Rutherforth, b. ii. c. x. ss. 12, 13. Wheaton's Élém. i. 33.

CHAPTER VII.

CHANGES IN A STATE.

CXXVI. BUT a State may undergo most important and extensive changes without losing its personality (a). It may be stripped of a portion of its subjects and its territory; it may place itself under the protection of another State, and be reduced to a semi-sovereignty; thereby, indeed, as has been shown, materially affecting its external relations, though retaining, in many respects, its corporate character: it may change its form of civil constitution or government from a Republic to a limited Monarchy, from an Aristocracy to a Despotism, or to any imaginable shape; but it does not thereby lose its personality, and does not therefore forfeit its rights, or become discharged from its obligations. The nation now governed by a Despot must pay the debt which she incurred under a Republican Government; the treaty con

(a) Grotius, lib. ii. c. ix. iii. i. "Idem si populus. Dixit Isocrates, et post eum Julianus imperator, civitates esse immortales, id est, esse posse, quia scilicet populus est ex eo corporum genere, quod ex distantibus constat, unique nomini subjectum est, quod habet píav, ut Plutarchus; spiritum unum, ut Paulus Jurisconsultus loquitur. Is autem spiritus, sive, in populo est vitæ civilis consociatio plena atque perfecta, cujus prima productio est summum imperium, vinculum, per quod respublica cohæret, spiritus vitalis quem tot millia trahunt, ut Seneca loquitur. Planè autem corpora hæc artificialia instar habent corporis naturalis. Corpus naturale idem esse non desinit, particulis paulatim commutatis, una manente specie, ut Alphenus ex philosophis disserit." This opinion of Alfenus is to be found in the Digest, 1. v. t. i. 76: "De judiciis et ubi quisque agere vel conveniri potest." A tribunal had been composed originally of certain judges; some of them during the hearing of the causes had retired, and others been substituted in their place: "Quærebatur, singulorum judicum mutatio eandem rem an aliud judicium fecisse. Respondi, non modo si unus aut alter, sed et si omnes judices mutati essent, tamen et rem eandem et judicium idem, quod antea fuisset, permanere."

tracted by a nation when represented to the rest of the world by the executive of a limited Monarchy, is equally binding upon her when she has fallen under the rule of an Oligarchy.

CXXVII. This vital principle of International Law is a necessary and principal consequence flowing from the doctrine of the moral personality and actual intercommunion of States. The Legion, the Roman jurist said, is the same though the members of it are changed; the Ship is the same though the planks of it are renewed; the Individual is the same though the particles of his body may not be the same in his youth as in his old age, and so "Populum eundem hoc tempore putari qui abhinc centum annis fuisset."

66

CXXVIII. The learned and wise Savigny, discussing the proper manner of cultivating and improving the municipal law of a country, expresses an opinion pregnant with true philosophy, when he observes that there is no such thing as the entirely individual and severed existence of mankind; but that, as every individual man must be considered as the member of a family, a people, and a State, so every age of a people must be regarded as the continuance and development of times that are past (b). Every age does not produce its own world according to its own arbitrary will and for itself only, but it does this in indissoluble intercommunion with the whole past (c). Every age, therefore, must acknowledge,

(b) Shakspere puts this reasoning into the mouth of the Duke of York:

"Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;

Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession ?"

Rich. II. act ii. sc. 1.

(e) "Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry, with the order of the world and with the mode of existence, decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein by the disposition of a Stupendous Wisdom, so moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall,

as it were, certain data, the inheritance of necessity, and yet not imposed upon it by force: a necessary inheritance, in so far as they are not dependent upon the arbitrary will of the particular present; not imposed upon it by force, because they are not, like the command of a master to a slave, dependent upon the arbitrary will of any particular foreign influence; but, on the contrary, are the free produce of the higher part of the nature of a people, parts of one whole continually existing and continually developing itself. Of this higher part of a people the present age is a member, which wills and acts in and with that whole; so that what is transmitted to us from that whole may be said to be freely produced by this particular member of it. History, Savigny concludes, is not therefore a mere collection of examples, but the only way to the true knowledge of our own actual status (d). Hooker had long before arrived at Savigny's conclusion: "To be commanded," he says, "we "do consent when that Society whereof we are part hath "at any time before consented, without revoking the same "after by the like universal agreement: wherefore as any "man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so "the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence, standeth as theirs who presently are of the "same societies, because corporations are immortal: we were "then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors "do live still" (e).

66

Applying this principle to International relations, we learn that as one generation does not constitute a State (f), it

renovation, and progression."-Burke, vol. v. p. 79. Thoughts on French Revolution, Ib. 183, 184.

(d) Ueber den Zweck der Zeitschrift für die geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft.-Savigny, Vermischte Schriften, 1-110.

(e) Hooker, Eccles. Pol. b. i.

(f) "Because a nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in members and in space."-Burke's Works, vol. x. p. 97: Reform of Representation in the House of Commons.

is not merely by the obligations contracted by one generation that the present State is bound; the engagements of the past, whether arising from the implied contract of long usage, or the express letter of treaty, or the pledge of the Executive Government, howsoever plighted, are as stringent upon her as those of the present. The individual succeeds to rights and obligations which he had no share in obtaining or contracting; and still more is this condition predicable of every corporate body. Nor is the greatest of all corporations, the State, exempt from the operation of a rule which is laid in the eternal constitution of things: "Coetus quilibet, "non minus quam persone singulares jus habet se obligandi "per se aut per majorem sui partem. Hoc jus transferre potest tum expressè tum per consequentiam necessariam, "puta imperium transferendo" (g). The rule by which an individual's duties are discovered - namely, by considering the place which he occupies in the great system of the universe; qua parte locatus es in re"-furnishes an equally sound maxim for national as for individual conduct. "Il ne "seroit pas," says the Abbé Mably, "moins superflu de "m'arrêter à prouver qu'un prince est lié par les engage"mens de son prédécesseur: puisqu'un Prince qui fait un "traité n'est que le délégué de sa nation, et que les traités "deviennent pour les peuples qui les ont conclus des lois

66

66

66

qu'il n'est jamais permis de violer." He proceeds to cite a passage from Bodinus to the effect that a King of France is not bound by the treaties of his predecessors; because each King of France is only the "usufructuarius" of his kingdom, and does not appoint his successor, who has an absolute right to the throne; and observes truly, "Il n'est "point de lecteur qui ne sente tous les vices de ce misérable "raisonnement" (h).

CXXIX. The authority of D'Aguesseau (i) and Montes

(g) Grotius, 1. ii. c. xiv. s. 11, p. 408.

(h) Mably, du Droit public, etc. t. i. pp. 111, 112.

(1) There are some striking remarks of D'Aguesseau, i. 493, s. 4, as to the observance of Treaties.