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District of Pennsylvania, to wit:

***** Seal.

BE IT REMEMBERED, That on the eighth day of October, in the thirty fifth year of the Independence of the United States of America, A. D. 1810, Farrand and Nicholas, of the said district, have deposited in this office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as proprietors in the words following, to wit:

"A Treatise on the Law of War. Translated from the original Latin of Cornelius Van Bynkershoek. Being the first book of his Quæstiones Juris Publici. With Notes, by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Counsellor at Law in the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Ne fortior omnia possit.Ovid "

In conformity to the act of the congress of the United States, intituled, "An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned." And also to the act, entitled "An act supplementary to an act, entitled "An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the time therein mentioned," and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints."

D. CALDWELL,

Clerk of the District of Pennsylvania.

PREFACE.

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THE following translation was made several years ago for my own private use, and without any intention of ever publishing it. But Mr. Hall, the editor of the American Law Journal, having expressed a wish to insert it in that valuable periodical work, I freely consented to it, having no other idea at the time but that it should appear there as an anonymous performance. The manuscript was accordingly handed over to the printers of the Jour. nal, and the first ten chapters were printed off, without undergoing any other corrections but such as occurred in revising the proof sheets, to which I subjoined a few short notes as I went along.

But while I was engaged in that occupation, I felt my ancient attachment to a favourite author revive; the subject grew upon me; I gave an attentive revisal to the remainder of the manuscript, and added to it a more copious body of notes; and I now, with diffidence, venture to present the result of my labours in my name to my brethren of the American bar. It is, according to its first destination, published in and for the American Law Journal, and will be delivered to its subscribers as the third number of the third volume of that publication; but a sufficient number of copies will also be struck

off for such as may wish to possess it as a separate work.

I need not explain to those who are conversant with the works of my author, that his Quæstiones Juris Publici are divided into two parts, entirely distinct from and unconnected with each other, otherwise than by being published together under one title, and by their general relation to subjects of public law. The first part, De Rebus Bellicis, treats exclusively of the law of war, and forms of itself a complete treatise on that particular subject. I have thought it best, therefore, to translate and publish it separately, under its appropriate title, A Treatise on the Law of War.

To expatiate on the merits of this excellent work would be useless. It is known and admired wherever the law of nations is acknowledged to have a binding force. Its authority is confessed in the cabinets of princes, as well as in the halls of courts of justice: to be unacquainted with it, is a disgrace to the lawyer and to the statesman. It ranks its author among the great masters of the law of nature and nations, with Grotius, Puffendorff, Wolffius, and Vattel. His range is not indeed so extensive as that of his illustrious colleagues; but he has more profoundly investigated and more copiously discussed than any of them the particular branch which he assigned to himself.

It is extraordinary that a treatise, the merit of which is so generally acknowledged, has not as yet been translated into any of the modern languages (the Low Dutch excepted), and that the English, particularly, who profess to admire it so much, have not favoured the world with a good translation of it into our common idiom. For we cannot consider as such the incorrect and incomplete version which in the year 1759 was, by the help

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