ate both the obedience of
citizens to the laws, and the authority of the magistrate in framing
laws and administering government; as they modify the intercourse of
independent commonwealths in peace, and prescribe limits to their
hostility in war. This important science comprehends only that part of
_private ethics_ which is capable of being reduced to fixed and general
rules. It considers only those general principles of _jurisprudence_ and
_politics_ which the wisdom of the lawgiver adapts to the peculiar
situation of his own country, and which the skill of the statesman
applies to the more fluctuating and infinitely varying circumstances
which affect its immediate welfare and safety. "For there are in nature
certain fountains of justice whence all civil laws are derived, but as
streams; and like as waters do take tinctures and tastes from the soils
through which they run, so do civil laws vary according to the regions
and governments where they are planted, though they proceed from the
same fountains."[2]--_Bacon's Dig. and Adv. of Learn._ Works, vol. i. p.
101.

On the great questions of morality, of politics, and of municipal law,
it is the object of this science to deliver only those fundamental
truths of which the particular application is as extensive as the whole
private and public conduct of men; to discover those "fountains of
justice," without pursuing the "streams" through the endless variety of
their course. But another part of the subject is treated with greater
fulness and minuteness of application; namely, that important branch of
it which professes to regulate the relations and intercourse of states,
and more especially, both on account of their greater perfection and
their more immediate reference to use, the regulations of that
intercourse as they are modified by the usages of the civilised nations
of Christendom. Here this science no longer rests in general principles.
That province of it which we now call the law of nations, has, in many
of its parts, acquired among our European nations much of the precision
and certainty of positive law, and the particulars of that law are
chiefly to be found in the works of those writers who have treated the
science of which I now speak. It is because they have classed (in a
manner which seems peculiar to modern times) the duties of individuals
with those of nations, and established their obligation on similar
grounds, that the whole science has been called, "The