HON. FRED DENNETT
A court is created for the purpose of administering justice, under law.
“This then is the general significance of law, a rule of action dictated by some superior being.” And then the great teacher of the English Common law lays down the principles of the moral law “that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due”; and of the law of nature “that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness,” adding, “that this is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law; for the several articles into which it is branched in our systems amount to no more than demonstrating that this or that action tends to man’s real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destructive of man’s happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it.”
From these two prior laws he derives the “third kind of law to regulate this mutual intercourse, called the ‘law of nations,’ which, cannot be dictated by any, but depends entirely upon the rules of natural law, or upon mutual compacts, treaties, leagues, and agreements between these several communities: in the construction also of which compacts we have no other rules to resort to, but the law of nature: being the only one to which all the communities are equally subject.”
The “natural law” is no longer the controlling “law.”
That which most promptly suggests itself to the mind of the ordinary man, when law is talked of, is not the moral law or the natural law, but municipal law, “a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.”
The tendency towards the enactment of man made statutes has magnified the “municipal Law,” until it is in the way of becoming the only law, and as it overshadows, then the principles of the moral law and the law of nature gradually are dwarfed, and become atrophied. The law of commerce is the “municipal law”; and as the commercial instinct becomes greater, the municipal law becomes the prevailing law. Statutory law takes the place of “common law.” Ethics are replaced by written inhibitions. The moral law becomes evanescent; men consult the revised codes to find the boundaries of that search for happiness, instead of consulting their inner consciousness.
It follows that there is left no such law as “international law,” for there are no statutes to bind nations and no supreme power to enforce a rule of conduct, and the ethics of natural law are not a world restraining force.
The evil of statutory law—necessary as it is—lies in the fact that man becomes prone to look to the numerous volumes to find a guidance of conduct. Nations are formed of members of society. If the units of the nations have become trained to look to the statutes for the control of actions, and feel at liberty to do those things which are not forbidden therein, they, as part of the nation, will refuse to be guided in their relationship with other nations by anything except their personal inclinations; moral ethics as a rule of conduct having disappeared.
Instead of the restraint of respect and love a new controlling sense is established, that of fear.