The whole body of this new scheme of manners, in support of the new scheme of polities, I consider as a strong and decisive proof of determined ambition and systematic hostility.  I defy the most refining ingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of the Jacobin Republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious, legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed resolution of keeping no terms with that world.  It has not been, as has been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only broke with their old government.  They made a schism with the whole universe, and that schism extended to almost everything, great and small.  For one, I wish, since it is gone thus far, that the breach had been so complete as to make all intercourse impracticable:  but, partly by accident, partly by design, partly from the resistance of the matter, enough is left to preserve intercourse, whilst amity is destroyed or corrupted in its principle.

This violent breach of the community of Europe we must conclude to have been made (even if they had not expressly declared it over and over again) either to force mankind into an adoption of their system or to live in perpetual enmity with a community the most potent we have ever known.  Can any person imagine, that, in offering to mankind this desperate alternative, there is no indication of a hostile mind, because men in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a right to act without coercion in their own territories?  As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists.  Men are never in a state of total independence of each other.  It is not the condition of our nature:  nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action without its having some effect upon others, or, of course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct.  The situations in which men relatively stand produce the rules and principles of that responsibility, and afford directions to prudence in exacting it.

Distance of place does not extinguish the duties or the rights of men; but it often renders their exercise impracticable.  The same circumstance of distance renders the noxious effects of an evil system in any community less pernicious.  But there are situations where this difficulty does not occur, and in which, therefore, those duties are obligatory and these rights are to be asserted.  It has ever been the method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in civil community.  Civil laws are not all of them merely positive.  Those which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.  Almost the whole