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Then laws of inheritance; on which I shall remark, that natural sons, if free, are to have a portion of their father's inheritance; but less than the legitimate sons: but that a natural son born of a slave remains a slave, 'nisi pater liberum thingaverit. This cruel law was the law of Rome and of the Church; our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, to their honour, held the reverse rule.
About the year 1608, Grotius published his celebrated work Mare Liberum, to assert in it against the English, the general freedom of the sea. The controversy arose upon the claim of Great Britain to enjoy the dominion of the British seas, in the most extensive sense of those words, both as to the right of navigating them, and the right of fishing within them.
By the modifications recently introduced into the constitution of their country, the Polish nobles had lost their liberum veto; unanimity of suffrages was no longer necessary in the Diet; the foreign powers were able to insolently impose their will upon it; the privileges of the noblesse, as well as their traditional faith, were attacked at the very foundations; religious fanaticism and national independence boiled up at the same time in every heart; the discontent, secretly fanned by the agents of Frederick, burst out, sooner than the skilful weavers of the plot could have desired, with sufficient intensity and violence to set fire to the four corners of Poland.
He was but twenty-six when he published his argument for the liberty of the sea, the famous Mare Liberum, and a little later appeared his work on the Antiquity of the Batavian Republic, which procured for him in Spain the title of "Hugo Grotius, auctor damnatus."
Such, notwithstanding, is the formula on which the Southern theorists make a stand. This right of separation is simply the liberum veto resuscitated for the benefit of federal institutions.
Pleased from benevolence he may be; but interested he cannot be. 'Estne aliquid inter salvum et salutem; inter liberum et libertatem? Salus est pereuntis, vel saltem periditantis: redemptio, quasi pons divinus, inter servum et libertatem, amissam, ideoque optatam'. Ib. p. 52.
No one was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge himself. He used to repeat Ramsden's Greek Ode on Gibraltar, and Smith's Latin one on Mare Liberum, with incessant rapture. It would have been his glory to have caught their spirit, he was absorbed in these things. A Classical Tripos would have changed Coleridge's destiny." Gentleman's Magazine, Dec. 1834.
The States were then asked to pledge their own internal revenue for twenty-five years to meet the national indebtedness, but this could only be done by unanimous consent, and while twelve States concurred, Rhode Island refused and the measure was defeated. It was again the infinite folly of the liberum veto which, prior to the great partition, condemned Poland to chronic anarchy.
It seems to me that for America, with her traditional, unalterable devotion to the doctrine of Mare Liberum, as Grotius stated it, there can be no peace conference with a Government which is in active and flagrant violation of that principle.
The Diet was to be confederated, that the Poles might be deprived of their last resource, the liberum veto. Some few patriots still raised their voices, even in the midst of the united armies of Russia, Austria, and Prussia; and among these Reyten was the most distinguished.
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