LECTURE II.
OF THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF NATIONS IN A STATE OF PEACE.
A view of the external rights and duties of nations in peace, will lead us to examine the grounds of national independence, the extent of territorial jurisdiction, the rights of embassy, and of commercial intercourse.
Nations are equal in respect to each other, and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights, whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength, or however greatly they may differ in government, religion, or manners. This perfect equality, and entire independence of all distinct states, is a fundamental principle of public law. It is a necessary consequence of this equality, that each nation has a right to govern itself as it may think proper, and no one nation is entitled to dictate a form of government, or religion, or a course of internal policy, to another. No state is entitled to take cognizance or notice of the domestic administration of another state, or of what passes within it as between the government and its own subjects.[1] The Spaniards, as Vattel observes, violated all rules of right, when they set up a tribunal of their own to judge the Inca of Peru according to their laws. If he had broken the law of nations in respect to them, they would have had a right to punish him; but when they undertook to judge of the merits of his own interior administration, and to try and punish him for
- ↑ Grotius de Jure belli et pacis, b. 1. c. 3. sec. 8. Vattel, Droit des Gens, b. 2. c. 4. sec. 54. Rutherforth’s Inst. b. 2. c. 9.
