characteristic of a lawyer, but the
language of Gaius, a much higher authority, and the passage quoted
before from the Institutes leave no room for doubt, that the
expressions were practically convertible. The difference between them
was entirely historical, and no distinction in essence could ever be
established between them. It is almost unnecessary to add that the
confusion between Jus Gentium, or Law common to all Nations, and
_international law_ is entirely modern. The classical expression for
international law is Jus Feciale or the law of negotiation and
diplomacy. It is, however, unquestionable that indistinct impressions
as to the meaning of Jus Gentium had considerable share in producing
the modern theory that the relations of independent states are
governed by the Law of Nature.

It becomes necessary to investigate the Greek conceptions of nature
and her law. The word [Greek: physis], which was rendered in the Latin
_natura_ and our _nature_, denoted beyond all doubt originally the
material universe, but it was the material universe contemplated under
an aspect which--such is our intellectual distance from those
times--it is not very easy to delineate in modern language. Nature
signified the physical world regarded as the result of some primordial
element or law. The oldest Greek philosophers had been accustomed to
explain the fabric of creation as the manifestation of some single
principle which they variously asserted to be movement, force, fire,
moisture, or generation. In its simplest and most ancient sense,
Nature is precisely the physical universe looked upon in this way as
the manifestation of a principle. Afterwards, the later Greek sects,
returning to a path from which the greatest intellects of Greece had
meanwhile strayed, added the _moral_ to the _physical_ world in the
conception of Nature. They extended the term till it embraced not
merely the visible creation, but the thoughts, observances, and
aspirations of mankind. Still, as before, it was not solely the moral
phenomena of human society which they understood by _Nature_, but
these phenomena considered as resolvable into some general and simple
laws.

Now, just as the oldest Greek theorists supposed that the sports of
chance had changed the material universe from its simple primitive
form into its present heterogeneous condition, so their intellectual
descendants imagined that but for untoward accident the human race
would have conformed i