n independent states there is not, the vicinage itself
is the natural judge. It is, preventively, the assertor of its own
rights, or, remedially, their avenger. Neighbors are presumed to take
cognizance of each other's acts. "_Vicini vicinorum facta praesumuntur
seire_." This principle, which, like the rest, is as true of nations as
of individual men, has bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe a duty
to know and a right to prevent any capital innovation which may amount
to the erection of a dangerous nuisance.[32] Of the importance of that
innovation, and the mischief of that nuisance, they are, to be sure,
bound to judge not litigiously: but it is in their competence to judge.
They have uniformly acted on this right. What in civil society is a
ground of action in politic society is a ground of war. But the exercise
of that competent jurisdiction is a matter of moral prudence. As suits
in civil society, so war in the political, must ever be a matter of
great deliberation. It is not this or that particular proceeding, picked
out here and there, as a subject of quarrel, that will do. There must be
an aggregate of mischief. There must be marks of deliberation; there
must be traces of design; there must be indications of malice; there
must be tokens of ambition. There must be force in the body where they
exist; there must be energy in the mind. When all these circumstances
combine, or the important parts of them, the duty of the vicinity calls
for the exercise of its competence: and the rules of prudence do not
restrain, but demand it.

In describing the nuisance erected by so pestilential a manufactory, by
the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for
such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world,
I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of the
evil. No man who has attended to the particulars of what has been done
in France, and combined them with the principles there asserted, can
possibly doubt it. When I compare with this great cause of nations the
trifling points of honor, the still more contemptible points of
interest, the light ceremonies, the undefinable punctilios, the disputes
about precedency, the lowering or the hoisting of a sail, the dealing in
a hundred or two of wildcat-skins on the other side of the globe, which
have often kindled up the flames of war between nations, I stand
astonished at those persons who do not feel a resentme