The causes of war that still remain, are
causes on which international law is silent--that large arrear of cases
as yet unsettled; or else they are cases in which though law speaks
with an authentic voice, it speaks in vain, because the circumstances
are doubtful; so that, if the law is fixed as a lamp nailed to a wall,
yet the _incidence_ of the law on the particular circumstances,
becomes as doubtful as the light of the lamp upon objects that are
capriciously moving. We see all this illustrated in a class of cases
that powerfully illustrate the good and the bad in war, the why and the
wherefore, as likewise the why _not_, and therefore I presume the
wherefore _not_; and this class of cases belongs to the _lex
vicinitatis_. In the Roman law this section makes a great figure.
And speaking accurately, it makes a greater in our own. But the reason
why this _law of neighborhood_ seems to fill so much smaller a
section in ours, is because in English law, being _positively_ a
longer section, _negatively_ to the whole compass of our law, it
is less. The Roman law would have paved a road to the moon. And what is
_that_ expressed in time? Let us see: a railway train, worked at
the speed of the Great Western Express, accomplishes easily a thousand
miles in twenty-four hours; consequently in two hundred and forty days
or eight months it would run into the moon with its buffers, and break
up the quarters of that Robinson Crusoe who (and without any Friday) is
the only policeman that parades that little pensive appendage or tender
to our fuming engine of an earth.
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