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box, but without being able to find or make it. I had made myself more than one of Locke's Commonplace Books, but never used any one of them. I had learnt and practised Byrom's Shorthand Writing, but no one could read it but myself. I had kept accounts by double entry,--day-book, journal, and ledger, with cash-book, bank-book, house-book, and letter-book. I had made extracts, copies, translations, and quotations, more perhaps than other man living, without ever being able to pack up my knowledge or my labors in any methodical order; and now doubt whether I might not have employed my time more profitably in some one great, well-compacted, comprehensive pursuit, adapting every hour of labor to the attainment of some great end." In December, 1841, Mr. Adams delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society a lecture on the war then existing between Great Britain and China. The principles stated and maintained in that lecture were so much in advance of the opinions entertained at the time, that it is believed to have been published in but a single newspaper in this country or in Europe, and never in a pamphlet form, except by the proprietors of the _Chinese Repository_, published in Macao, China, in May, 1842. Though his views were ridiculed or repudiated by many when delivered, they are at this day acknowledged; and are made some of the chief grounds of the justification of that invasion of the Chinese empire now apparently in successful progress. The subject is of preeminent importance, and is canvassed with that laborious research and independence eminently characteristic of the author. In this lecture, after controverting the doctrine of an eminent French writer, who contended that there was no such thing as international law, and that the word law is not applicable to the obligations incumbent upon nations, on the ground that law is a rule of conduct prescribed by a superior; and that nations, being independent, acknowledge no superior, and have no common sovereign from whom they can receive law,--Mr. Adams proceeds to maintain that "by the law of nations is to be understood, not one code of laws, binding alike on all the nations of the earth, but a system of rules varying according to the character and condition of the parties concerned." There is a law of nations, among Christian communities, which is the law recognized by the constitution of the United States as obligatory upon them in their intercourse with
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