ned underlying and pervading so great a variety of
usage. We should have a sort of respect for rules and principles so
universal. Perhaps we should speak of the common ingredient as being
of the essence of the transaction into which it entered, and should
stigmatise the remaining apparatus of ceremony, which varied in
different communities, as adventitious and accidental. Or it may be,
we should infer that the races which we were comparing had once obeyed
a great system of common institutions of which the Jus Gentium was the
reproduction, and that the complicated usages of separate
commonwealths were only corruptions and depravations of the simpler
ordinances which had once regulated their primitive state. But the
results to which modern ideas conduct the observer are, as nearly as
possible, the reverse of those which were instinctively brought home
to the primitive Roman. What we respect or admire, he disliked or
regarded with jealous dread. The parts of jurisprudence which he
looked upon with affection were exactly those which a modern theorist
leaves out of consideration as accidental and transitory; the solemn
gestures of the mancipation; the nicely adjusted questions and answers
of the verbal contract; the endless formalities of pleading and
procedure. The Jus Gentium was merely a system forced on his attention
by a political necessity. He loved it as little as he loved the
foreigners from whose institutions it was derived and for whose
benefit it was intended. A complete revolution in his ideas was
required before it could challenge his respect, but so complete was it
when it did occur, that the true reason why our modern estimate of the
Jus Gentium differs from that which has just been described, is that
both modern jurisprudence and modern philosophy have inherited the
matured views of the later jurisconsults on this subject. There did
come a time, when from an ignoble appendage of the Jus Civile, the Jus
Gentium came to be considered a great though as yet imperfectly
developed model to which all law ought as far as possible to conform.
This crisis arrived when the Greek theory of a Law of Nature was
applied to the practical Roman administration of the Law common to
all Nations.

The Jus Naturale, or Law of Nature, is simply the Jus Gentium or Law
of Nations seen in the light of a peculiar theory. An unfortunate
attempt to discriminate them was made by the jurisconsult Ulpian, with
the propensity to distinguish