pared with those of an earlier
date, it will be seen that, as soon as the Roman maxims were received,
Warfare instantly assumed a more tolerable complexion. If the Roman
law of Occupancy is to be taxed with having had pernicious influence
on any part of the modern Law of Nations, there is another chapter in
it which may be said, with some reason, to have been injuriously
affected. In applying to the discovery of new countries the same
principles which the Romans had applied to the finding of a jewel, the
Publicists forced into their service a doctrine altogether unequal to
the task expected from it. Elevated into extreme importance by the
discoveries of the great navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, it raised more disputes than it solved. The greatest
uncertainty was very shortly found to exist on the very two points on
which certainty was most required, the extent of the territory which
was acquired for his sovereign by the discoverer, and the nature of
the acts which were necessary to complete the _adprehensio_ or
assumption of sovereign possession. Moreover, the principle
itself, conferring as it did such enormous advantages as the
consequence of a piece of good luck, was instinctively mutinied
against by some of the most adventurous nations in Europe, the Dutch,
the English, and the Portuguese. Our own countrymen, without expressly
denying the rule of International Law, never did, in practice, admit
the claim of the Spaniards to engross the whole of America south of
the Gulf of Mexico, or that of the King of France to monopolise the
valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. From the accession of
Elizabeth to the accession of Charles the Second, it cannot be said
that there was at any time thorough peace in the American waters, and
the encroachments of the New England Colonists on the territory of the
French King continued for almost a century longer. Bentham was so
struck with the confusion attending the application of the legal
principle, that he went out of his way to eulogise the famous Bull of
Pope Alexander the Sixth, dividing the undiscovered countries of the
world between the Spaniards and Portuguese by a line drawn one hundred
leagues West of the Azores; and, grotesque as his praises may appear
at first sight, it may be doubted whether the arrangement of Pope
Alexander is absurder in principle than the rule of Public law, which
gave half a continent to the monarch whose servants had fulfilled t