Law of Nature and
Nations."

Whether this appellation be the happiest that could have been chosen
for the science, and by what steps it came to be adopted among our
modern moralists and lawyers,[3] are inquiries, perhaps, of more
curiosity than use, and which, if they deserve any where to be deeply
pursued, will be pursued with more propriety in a full examination of
the subject than within the short limits of an introductory discourse.
Names are, however, in a great measure arbitrary; but the distribution
of knowledge into its parts, though it may often perhaps be varied with
little disadvantage, yet certainly depends upon some fixed principles.
The modern method of considering individual and national morality as the
subjects of the same science, seems to me as convenient and reasonable
an arrangement as can be adopted. The same rules of morality which hold
together men in families, and which form families into commonwealths,
also link together these commonwealths as members of the great society
of mankind. Commonwealths, as well as private men, are liable to injury,
and capable of benefit, from each other; it is, therefore, their
interest as well as their duty to reverence, to practise, and to
enforce those rules of justice which control and restrain injury, which
regulate and augment benefit, which, even in their present imperfect
observance, preserve civilised states in a tolerable condition of
security from wrong, and which, if they could be generally obeyed, would
establish, and permanently maintain, the well-being of the universal
commonwealth of the human race. It is therefore with justice that one
part of this science has been called "_the natural law of individuals_,"
and the other "_the natural law of states_;" and it is too obvious to
require observation,[4] that the application of both these laws, of the
former as much as of the latter, is modified and varied by customs,
conventions, character, and situation. With a view to these principles,
the writers on general jurisprudence have considered states as moral
persons; a mode of expression which has been called a fiction of law,
but which may be regarded with more propriety as a bold metaphor, used
to convey the important truth, that nations, though they acknowledge no
common superior, and neither can nor ought to be subjected to human
punishment, are yet under the same obligations mutually to practise
honesty and humanity, which would have bound individual