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the ancient adage, “ubi societas ibi jus est ;" but States who are not members of this League, are not bound to regard those who are such, as clothed, on that account, with any peculiar privileges in their general International relations.

CXXIII. This observation is applicable to all associations of States which are not founded upon universal principles of International Law, but framed for the advancement of some particular object; such, for instance, as associations for the suppression of the slave-trade, or the great German commercial confederations called the Zollverein, whether presided over by Austria or by Prussia. (y)

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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 territoryevents 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, Britanny, and other provinces into France, are among the most familiar historical instances which illustrate this proposition.

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CXXVI. But a State may undergo most important and extensive changes without losing its personalty.() It may be stripped of a por

(y) 1 D. M. et C. Index to this title, and Martens, Nouv. Rec. ii., 434-508 (A. D. 1841): Convention entre les Gouvernemens des Etats appartenans à l'association douanière, Prussienne, etc.

(a) Vattel, l. 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 Elém. i. 33.

(b) 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 v plav, ut, Plutarchus; spiritum unum, ut Paulus Jurisconsultus loquitur. Is autem spiritus, sive is in populo est vitæ civilis con

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tion of its subjects and its territory; it may place itself under the pro-
tection 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 thereby
forfeit its rights, or become discharged from its obligations. The nation
now governed by a Despot must pay the debt which she incurred
[*149]
under a Republican Government the treaty contracted *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 jurists 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 abhine centum annis fuisset." (c)

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 developement of times that are past. (d) 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 [*150] with the whole past.(e) Every age, therefore, must acknowledge, *as it were, certain data, the inheritance of necessity, and yet

sociatio plena atque perfecta, cujus prima productio est summum imperium, venculum per quod respublica cohæret, spiritas 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, unâ 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 cause had retired, and others being substituted in their place; "Quærebatur, singulorum judicum mutatio eandum rem an aliud judicium fecisse. Respondi, non modo si unus aut alter sed et si omnes judices mutati essent, tamen et rem eandum et judicium idem, quod antea fuisset permanere."

(c) Dig., ubi supra.

(d) Shakespere 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

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, "the service of perfect freedom"-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. (f) 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." (9)

Applying this principle to International relations, we learn that as one generation does not constitute a State, (h) it is not merely by the obligations contracted by one generation that the present State is [*151] 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 personæ 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."() 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; "quâ parte locathe 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 tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression."-Burke, v. 79. Thoughts on French Revolution, Ib. 183, 184.

(f) Uber deu Zweck der Zeitschüft für die geschichtliche Rechtswissenschalft.Savigny, Vermischte Schriften, 1—110.

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

(h) "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.

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

~

ая

tus es in re"-furnishes an equally sound maxim for national as for indi-
vidual conduct. "Il ne seroit pas," says the Abbé Mably, "moins su-
perflu de m'arrêter à prouver q'un Prince est lié par les engagemens de
son prédécesseur: puisqu'un Prince qui fait un Traité n'est que la dé-
légue de sa nation, et que les Traités deviennent pour les peuples qui les
ont conclus, des Lois 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."(k)
CXXIX. The authority of D'Aguesseau (7) and Montesquieu further
strengthens a position of such paramount importance *to the
[*152]
peace of the globe. The latter conclusively destroys the sophis-
try by which it has been attempted to chicane away the binding force of
Treaties, on the ground of their having been extorted by that superior
force which might vitiate a civil contract between individuals.(m)

It might indeed, have been supposed that this truth was too firmly established, and the value of it too deeply felt and too generally recognised, to be liable to question in these days. After the recent overthrow of the Orleans dynasty in France, the proclamation of M. de Lamartine (1848) appeared for a moment to throw the weight of France into the opposite scale, as disavowing the obligations in the treaty of Vienna, chiefly, it would seem, because at the time it was made, France was governed by a Monarchical, and at the time it was disavowed by a Republic Government.(n)

Now no doctrine more fatal than this to the tranquillity of the globe can well be maintained-none which it is more the duty of every upholder of International Law to denounce. Nor can any doctrine be more pernicious to the country itself, be it Monarchical or Republican, which propounds it. "Nulla res," said Cicero, with all the energy of moral wisdom," vehementius Rempublicam continet quam fides." What becomes of national faith if it be made to depend upon a form of Government? Much what would become of individual faith if it depended upon no change happening in the condition or age of the person who plighted it.

CXXX. The importance of the subject did not escape the notice of Grotius; and I do not know that, upon such a point, a higher authority can be appealed to: "Neque refert quomodo gubernetur, regione, an plurium, an multitudinis imperio. Idem enim est populus Romanus sub regibus, consulibus, imperatoribus. Imo etiamsi plenissimo jure regnetur, populus idem erit qui ante erat *cum sui esset juris, [*153] dum rex ei prasit ut caput istius populi, non ut caput alterius

(k) Mably, De Droit Public, &c., t. i. p. 111, 112.

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

(m) Esprit des Lois, 1. xxvi. c. xx.-" Qu'il ne faut pas décider pas les principes des lois civiles les choses qui appartinnent an droit des gens."

(n) Trois mois au pouvoir par M. de Lamartine, p. 75.

populi. Nam imperium quod in rege ut in capite, in populo manet ut in toto, cujus pars est caput: atque adeo rege, si electus est, aut regis familia extincta, jus imperandi ad populum redit, ut supra ostendimus."(0)

And in another part of this great work he expresses his free and manly opinion on this matter: "Huc et illa frequens quæstio referenda est de pactis personalibus ac realibus. Et siquidem cum populo libero actum sit, dubium non est, quin quod ei promittitur sui natura reale sit, quia subjectum est res permanens. Imo etiamsi status civitatis in regnum mutetur, manebit fœdus, quia manet idem corpus etsi mutato capite, et ut supra diximus, imperium, quod per Regem exercetur, non desinit imperium esse populi."(p) With this opinion Heineccius, in his commentary on Grotius, entirely concurs.

CXXXI. An English civilian of considerable note in his day, commenting upon this passage, recognises and adopts the doctrine which it conveys: "All leagues and treaties are national; and where they are not to expire within a shorter time, though made with usurpers, will bind legal princes if they succeed, and so vice versâ; and a league made with a king of any nation will oblige that nation if they continue free, though the Government should be changed to a Commonwealth, because the nation is still the same though under different Governments."(q)

Vattel, whom Lord Stowell pronounced to be not the least indulgent of modern professors of Public Law, (2) speaks unhesitatingly to the same effect: "Puisque les traités publics, même personnels, conclus par un roi, on par tout autre souverain qui en a le pouvoir, sont traités de l'Etat, et obligent la Nation entière, les trités réels, faits pour subsister indépendamment de la personne qui les a con[*154] clus obligent sans doute les successeurs. L'obligation qu'ils imposent à l'Etat passe successivement à tous ses conducteurs, à mesure qu'ils prennent en main l'autorité publique. Il en est de même des droits acquis par ces traités. Ils sont acquis à l'Etat, et passent à ses conducteurs successifs."(s) And in another place he says, "Des qu'une puissance légitime contracte au nom de l'Etat, elle oblige la nation elle même, et par consequent tous les conducteurs futurs de la société. Lors donc qu'un Prince a la pouvoir de contracter au nom de l'Etat, il oblige tous ses successeurs; et ceux-ci ne sont pas moins tenus que luimême à remplir ses engagements."()

CXXXII. The language of Bynkershoek is still more forcible. In one passage he observes: "Rectè dixit Grotius(u) jus Populi non deficere nisi deficiat ipse Populus. Formâ autem Regiminis mutatâ non mutatur ipse Populus. Eadem utique Republica est, quamvis nunc hoc, nunc alio modo regatur: alioquin diceres, Rempublicam in statu, quo nunc est, exsolutam videri pactis et debitis in alio statu contractis De debitis

(0) Grotius, 1. ii. c. ix. s. 8. (p) Grotius, 1. ii. c. xvi. s. 16. (4) An Essay concerning the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Sovereigns by Matthew Tindall, L. L. D. p. 14 (London, 1734). For pr

(r) The Maria, 1 Rob. Adm. Rep. p. 163.
(8) Vattel, Le Droit de Gens, 1. ii. c. xii. s. 191, p. 400.
(t) Ib. 1. ii. c. xiv. s. 215.

(u) De Jure Bel. ix. 1. ii. c. ix. s. 3.

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