ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]

passed, "for the regulation and government of slaves." 2 Hildr. 455.

1765. An act for the establishing and regulating Patrols, and for preventing any person from purchasing provisions or any other commodities from, or selling such to any slave, unless such slave shall produce a ticket from his or her owner, manager or employer.

1768. An act to amend and continue the foregoing.

1770. An act for ordering and governing slaves within this province, and for establishing a jurisdiction for the trial of offences committed by such slaves and other persons therein mentioned, and to prevent the inveighling and carrying away slaves from their masters, owners or employers. This act was a copy of the act of South Carolina of 1740.

The sections are, for the greater part almost literal copies of corresponding sections in the Carolina act. Sec. 14, 15, 16, 17, relate to poisoning by slaves, teaching to poison, and forbid the administering of medicines by slaves. Sec 39, forbids teaching slaves to "read writing," in addition to the injunction of the Carolina act, sec. 45.2

'Neale v. Farmer, 9 Geo. R. 582, concludes, that, as in S. Carolina, ante, p. 306, n. 2, killing a slave is not felony by common law.

2 The statutes above named are given in Prince's and Cobb's Digests, except as they have been repealed or modified in parts, by later statutes.

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW EXISTING FOR THE SEVERAL PARTS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD, AND RELATING TO FREEDOM AND BONDAGE OF THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH SUCH A LAW MIGHT EXIST.

§ 231. Public international law being based on the necessity for a rule of action between the possessors of sovereign power, and private international law on the recognition of persons as having been at different times subject to the jurisdiction of different possessors of that power, either of these divisions of international law may come into existence, or be applied, wherever any portion of that power is independently vested or manifested.

While there is little difference of opinion, among writers on public law, as to the abstract nature of that authority which, in their conception, is the characteristic of any one of those political bodies or persons known as sovereign states or independent national polities, there has been much contrariety among them in the recognition of the entirety of that power in the various visible and concrete forms in which political authority or dominion has been manifested.

§ 232. It seems to have been commonly assumed for an axiomatic principle, that sovereignty or supreme national power is always manifested as the prerogative of a unity, as indivisible in its existence; that, if regarded as made visible in distinctly separate acts of power, those acts, in order to be acts of sovereign power, must ultimately depend upon, or proceed from

INDIVISIBLE SOVEREIGNTY.

313

one and the same possessor of power; that the sovereignty which marks or characterizes states is not to be regarded as an aggregation of various distinct and separate powers, each of which may be independently exercised by different political bodies or persons.1

It is undoubtedly true that in the international recognition of sovereignty which is made by political bodies, or persons themselves claiming to constitute a state or nation, the only other possessors of sovereign power are persons or bodies each holding, within its own domain, all the powers which can be attributed to a state or nation. For the persons or bodies so recognized must be equal in the nature of their power; that is, equally sovereign in all respects; and therefore it is true, that, as regards each other, the manifestation of any single act of sovereign power proceeds from a person or body possessing all other attributes of sovereign power. In view of the international intercourse of nations or states, properly and strictly so called, any person or body, manifesting authority over persons and things, must either possess all the powers of a sovereign state, or be a subordinate person or body, in reference to some one such possessor of sovereignty. It is a basal fact in public law, that states or nations respectively recognize only themselves as the possessors of any portion of sovereign power, and can know themselves, respectively, as the only persons or entities who are absolute and independent of law in the strict and proper sense; although in certain exceptional cases, states may be known as being in an inferior or limited position in reference to other states, though still being politically distinct and it may be difficult, in matters of public law, to distinguish clearly between a technical and a virtual sovereignty."

Calhoun's Essay on Gov., 1 Works, p. 146. "There is no difficulty in understanding how powers appertaining to sovereignty may be divided, and the exercise of one portion delegated to one set of agents and another portion to another; or how sovereignty may be vested in one man or in a few, or in many. But how sovereignty itself the supreme power-can be divided, how the people of the several states can be partly sovereign and partly not sovereign, partly supreme and partly not supreme, it is impossible to conceive. Sovereignty is an entire thing; to divide it is to destroy it."

Vattel, B. 1, c. 1. Phillimore, International Law, Part 2, c. 2.

314

DISTRIBUTED SOVEREIGNTY.

§ 233. Whether recognized by external and independent political persons or bodies, or by private persons subject to laws proceeding from the exercise of that power, sovereign power is known, not by force of any law in the strict sense, but by the fact of its exercise, by possession. The possession of sovereignty which is recognized as such by other states (externally), must be, as before said, of all sovereign powers, otherwise it will be attributed to some who exercise it only as being themselves subject or dependent persons, or political bodies.

But in the interior or internal manifestation of political power, i. e., its manifestation towards the constituent parts or materials of a state, power over persons and things may be known as sovereign, though divided or held by distribution among distinct persons or bodies, who, in the apprehension of foreign or exterior persons, together constitute only the elements of that unit which they recognize as the possessor of the sum of sovereign power or the state. If in point of fact those constituent persons or bodies severally exercise any power independently of any other known political person or persons exercising similar or different powers, that power is, in the public law of the state, a sovereign power in its exercise or manifestation; though not held by a sovereign in the ordinary acceptation of the word in public international law.2

The sovereignty of a state or nation, in order that it may be a sovereign state or nation, is, then, as to the rest of the

1 Was not this distribution of the powers belonging to a national sovereignty the basal idea of Gothic or Germanic feudalism, which once entered into the constitution of all the modern nations of western Europe? The feudal chief had an independent sovereign authority for local objects, coexistent with a general subjection of himself and vassals to the king or nation. See Bodin's Rep., as to a sort of sovereignty in certain great families. B. 1 c. 2, (Knolles' Tr. p. 13.) The towns (muncipium) first acquired, as corporations, an authority like that of feudal lords. The petty sovereignty of chiefs among the Celtic nations appears to have been more isolated. The Roman political system tended to concentrate all autonomic power in a single hand. Compare Lieber's Civil Liberty and Self-Government.

2 G. T. Curtis's Hist. of the Origin, &c., of the Const. of the U. S., vol. I., p. 206. "Political sovereignty is capable of partition, according to the character of its subjects, so that," &c. The partition of the powers of sovereignty, referred to in the text, is a different thing from that distribution or separation of the three functions or departments of sovereign power, (the three modes or forms by which it may be manifested, the legislative, judicial, and executive authority,) which is often discussed by publicists, as Bowyer's Univ. Public Law, p. 144, and citations.

THE COLONIAL DISTRIBUTION.

315

world indivisible, or the prerogative of a unity. But the constituents of that state may, relatively to each other, either be an individual or a number of individuals holding, as a political unit, the whole power of a state; or else an aggregate of individuals or political unities, each holding, independently of the others, separate powers for specified objects and within specified limits of space or of time.

This may certainly be the judicial apprehension of such powers, or their legal character in the jurisprudence of such a state. Whether there must not be in every nation or state some one person, or mass of persons, who potentially hold, or may exercise, if he or they will, every power that can be called sovereign or political power, is a different question; belonging to the domain of political ethics.'

§ 234. Even supposing political power over persons and things to be separately invested in distinct portions or constituents of a nation, under a law proceeding from some one supreme national power, the exercise of that power within specified jurisdictions, and over persons as subjects thereto, will give occasion to the existence of an international or quasi-international law as regards the exercise and effects of that power.

2

§ 235. During the connection of the North American colonies with the empire of Great Britain, the sum of the powers of national sovereignty over their territory was distributed, at least according to the views of the colonists, in some undetermined proportion, between the parliament or imperial government, and the local governments of the several colonies. The rules which regulated the public or political intercourse between these various constituent parts of the empire were included in the public municipal law of the empire, a law of political organization, and formed a law in the strict sense of the term, because resting, in theory at least, on the undivided national will, though they resembled public international law in many respects. But since these several parts did, in fact, separately

'Domat, Public Law. B. I., tit. 1. Pufendorff, B. 7, c. 4, § 1. Paley, Moral Phil, B. VI., c. 6. Lieber, Civil Lib., &c., vol. 1, 168.

Ante, ch. III.

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »