Professor Christian, in his comments upon Blackstone's definition of municipal law, viz, "a rule of conduct prescribed by the supreme power of the state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong," has, perhaps, given the opposition its most forcible presentation. He says, "the latter branch of the definition must either be superfluous, or convey a defective idea of a municipal law;--for if right and wrong are referred to the municipal law itself, then whatever it commands is right, and what it prohibits is wrong, and the clause would be insignificant tautology. But if right and wrong are to be referred to the law of nature, then the definition will become deficient or erroneous; for though the municipal law may seldom or never command what is wrong, yet, in ten thousand instances, it forbids what is right. It forbids an unqualified person to kill a hare or a partridge ;-it forbids a man to exercise a trade without having served seven years as an apprentice ;--it forbids a man to keep a horse or a servant without paying the tax. Now all these acts were perfectly right before the prohibition of the municipal law."

In these comments two classes of cases are recognized as not consonant with the laws of nature, and yet valid laws;-first, the exceptional instances when the municipal law commands what is wrong by the law of nature; and, secondly, when it prohibits what by the law of nature is right.

Of the former class, the testimony of Blackstone is explicit, that "no human laws should be suffered to contradict" the law of nature, in other words, to command what it forbids.

Chief Justice Kent says, that "we ought not to separate the science of public law from that of ethics;" and again, that "states or bodies politic are to be considered as moral persons, having a public will, capable and free to do right and wrong, inasmuch as they are collections of individuals, each of whom carries with him into the service of the community, the same binding law of morality and religion, which ought to control his conduct in private life." If, then, the state commands him to do an immoral or an irreligious act, what shall be done with the "binding law of morality and religion which

ought to control his conduct," and which forbids his doing an immoral or irreligious act?

Heineccius and the other great masters of ethical and national jurisprudence, all agree that the principles of the law of nature apply with equal obligation to individuals and to nations, so that the one cannot rightfully command, nor the other submit to, a natural wrong.

The edict of Herod and other examples already cited, are illustrations in point. And, finally, Lord Chief Justice Hobart, speaking explicitly to this point, says, that "even an act of parliament made against natural justice is void in itself, for jura naturæ sunt immutabilia, and they are leges legum."

In fact, the history of jurisprudence furnishes many instances of municipal enactments that have been annulled, and sentenced to be, "not bad law, but not law," because, so far from commanding or establishing right, they were themselves wrong, and the act "perfectly right before," was also perfectly right after their enactment, always right, and right in spite of the law, and it may be summed up as well established upon authority and in principle, that a municipal law which should command what the law of nature forbids, or forbid what the law of nature commands, that is to say, a municipal law which runs counter to the positive injunctions of God's will, is, ipso facto, void.

In respect to the latter class of cases, when the municipal law prohibits what by the law of nature is right, several considerations apply. And first, by the law of nature, or the law of God, no man is bound to do all that he has a right to do, or, in other words, all that it would be right for him to do; and conversely, a man may waive many of his natural rights, and not become thereby a doer of wrong. This is certainly too plain, simple, and familiar a proposition to require extended proof or illustration, for precisely upon this basis is it that society becomes at all possible, or even the family. No man enters either, without a greater or less sacrifice and abandonment of his natural rights. A man may have the right to possess and enjoy a great variety of natural goods, he may eat the rich and pulpy fruits of every tree of the garden, yet he

may also elect between them, accept the one good, reject the others, may regale his taste with the nectarous peach, and leave the golden plum unplucked upon the bough, he may combine his choices at pleasure, and, in all, the law of nature remain inviolate. If, therefore, a man of himself may rightfully avoid doing, or neglect, or omit to do something which by the law of nature is right, in other words, if the not-doing a given thing is not wrong for the individual, then the state may, by its municipal law, prohibit the doing, or enjoin the notdoing the same act, and assuming this action of society to have been taken in proper circumstances, and for proper purposes, or for the highest welfare of the individual and the community, the state, in projecting the law, has done no wrong by the law of nature, and the law itself is a valid statute, good and binding upon the conscience of each individual, not only because it is enacted by the supreme power in the state, but because it is enacted with due regard to the higher behests of God. It imposes no wrongful restraint upon the subject, for it only, in a proper case, prohibits him from doing what it is perfectly right for him not to do; so that even upon the application of the most stringent principles, the municipal law may prohibit, to some extent, what by the law of nature is right, in other words, may make the doing of it in society a wrong.

Secondly, man, the constant integer in this problem of law, fills a two-fold sphere. In the golden dreams of poesy, and in the stricter logic of theory, he is to be regarded, in the first place, as a solus on the face of the earth. In this view, so far as human relations are concerned, he will be perfectly absolute and unrelated;—with all the qualities of his being so completed in himself, that all his tendencies to action, to pos session, to dominion, shall be perfectly free,-with no extant power to restrain them,-no thing, individual, or law, to hold in or bound the fullest and freest exercise of any possible right -with liberty to feel, to think, to aspire, to act, to appropri ate, to bear rule, that shall be bounded only by his own desires and the possibilities of nature. In this view, laws are as the

straight lines of geometry, drawn at infinite, without curves or angles, and formed into no vessels of capacity.

But, except in theory, man stands associated with others, one of a complex or multiple, interwoven by primal constitution into the complex and parti-colored web, society. In him there unite the absolutism of the individual as the warp of the fabric, and the sympathies of relation, as its flowering, curiously figured woof;-and as in the textile fabric, so here, the warp serves as the great understratum of support, the firm basis of the instincts, and the intuitions, the great natural boundary, resistance and countercheck, of the softer and more voluptuous sympathies and judgments. As also this warp in the completed fabric has its tension, its line of directions, and its natural configurations, qualified by the work wrought upon it, so man, as he develops into society, comes into alliance with other men, each of whom is his peer, absolute as himself, and with as absolute a right to the enjoyment of all the gifts of nature, yields up and surrenders somewhat of his individual rigidity and straightness, for the more graceful and highly cultivated product of society. In other words, it becomes evident, that unless some new law, or a new and enlarged reading of the absolute law, intervenes to regulate the distribution of the objects of desire and right among the absolute claimants, unless the spirit of a jurisprudence more comprehensive than that of the absolute life be evoked, the relative life, society, equally the creature of God with the absolute life, becomes impossible of fulfillment, and a failure; so that in reducing man to the social harmony, it must follow, that what may be right in itself, right everywhere in performance by the absolute man, (such a man being supposable), may and often must become morally and divinely, because constitutionally, wrong, when attempted in the sphere of the relative life, or by man in organized society. And this, in general terms, is the proposition that covers all particular cases that are to be justified as law. The concrete of the poposition is, that though in the absence of municipal law, the killing of a hare or a partridge is right, yet, whenever the best good of associated man, or when society for its highest development, or its greatest safety,

requires some limitation of the exercise of this absolute prerogative, and the limitation shall be imposed in a right manner, and be in its nature just, the prohibition to kill is also right, and such prohibitory enactment is not only sanctioned by the divine thought, but is ancillary even to the perfectness of the divine constitution.

The sanction of the law of nature and the law of revelation is the direct and express will of God, but so far forth as municipal law transcends this express will, its sanction and test are that it tends and serves, as much as may be, to upbuild man as an individual and as society, in other words, to fill out in the details of human freedom the ends of man as a divinely appointed social being.

Having spoken now of the subjects which municipal law may discuss and regulate, it remains to be said, in a word, what must be the latitude of its enactments, with what motives, and for what general purposes they may be made, in short, what must be the spirit of the law; and therefore,

Thirdly, municipal institutions, in their mode, extent, and spirit, must complement humanity;-they cannot, therefore, violate the behests of enlightened benevolence;-they cannot command what is not intrinsically promotive of the normal development of man and society;--they cannot prohibit what is thus promotive ;--but for the purposes of individual and social good, they can and may command and enjoin whatever right thing is in the judgment of society best adapted for those ends, and may and ought to prohibit all things which in themselves tend to wrong, or which are, or inherently tend to be, injurious to the social being. And thus it is possible, and the requisite of all laws, whether commanding or prohibiting, to conform either to the express law of nature, or to that celestial benevolence which is the spirit of all law.

It is true, man is not as the apple-tree in respect of lifeissues. The tree enters upon its activities not in freedom, but, as it were, guided in all by the finger of Deity. Man, on the other hand, bears his fruit in freedom, surrounded by the God-will, as the vale is surrounded by its girdle of hills; yet, as here, every living and green thing, all cheerful,