f their creed, and was even regarded as a summary of all the others.
It is probable, however, that the power which it ultimately acquired
over the events of 1789 was not entirely owing to its popularity in
France, for in the middle of the century it passed over to America.
The American lawyers of the time, and particularly those of Virginia,
appear to have possessed a stock of knowledge which differed chiefly
from that of their English contemporaries in including much which
could only have been derived from the legal literature of continental
Europe. A very few glances at the writings of Jefferson will show how
strongly his mind was affected by the semi-juridical, semi-popular
opinions which were fashionable in France, and we cannot doubt that it
was sympathy with the peculiar ideas of the French jurists which led
him and the other colonial lawyers who guided the course of events in
America to join the specially French assumption that "all men are born
equal" with the assumption, more familiar to Englishmen, that "all men
are born free," in the very first lines of their Declaration of
Independence. The passage was one of great importance to the history
of the doctrine before us. The American lawyers, in thus prominently
and emphatically affirming the fundamental equality of human beings,
gave an impulse to political movements in their own country, and in a
less degree in Great Britain, which is far from having yet spent
itself; but besides this they returned the dogma they had adopted to
its home in France, endowed with vastly greater energy and enjoying
much greater claims on general reception and respect. Even the more
cautious politicians of the first Constituent Assembly repeated
Ulpian's proposition as if it at once commended itself to the
instincts and intuitions of mankind; and of all the "principles of
1789" it is the one which has been least strenuously assailed, which
has most thoroughly leavened modern opinion, and which promises to
modify most deeply the constitution of societies and the politics of
states.

The grandest function of the Law of Nature was discharged in giving
birth to modern International Law and to the modern Law of War, but
this part of its effects must here be dismissed with consideration
very unequal to its importance.

Among the postulates which form the foundation of International Law,
or of so much of it as retains the figure which it received from its
original architects, there are