102. Nations attain the perfection proper to them only when they constitute a universal society. -- Man tends naturally at all times to enlarge the circle of his social relations; the ultimate term of this tendency is the universal association of people. The collection of rights and duties resulting from this universal association constitutes the common law of nations, which, like individual and social law, has its foundation in nature itself.
103. Among independent societies, considered abstractly, there exists a perfect equality of rights and duties; inequality can arise only from concrete facts. -- Independent societies, considered abstractly, are only the social nature reproduced many times; but reprodnetion is not change; therefore they are perfectly equal. But three kinds of concrete fact, viz., origin, consent, and right, may produce inequality among the societies. Thus, colonies depend on the mother country by origin; the weak consent from need to submit to the powerful; those who have acted unjustly are punished in virtue of violated right.{1}
104. International love is the basis of all the duties of nations to one another. -- If nature imposes on individuals the duty of loving one another, with much greater reason does it impose this duty on nations, who represent man in a state of greater perfection. But while the love that we owe others must be reconciled with that which we owe ourselves, the love which one nation owes another must be in harmony not only with that which it owes itself, but also with that which is due to its citizens.
105. The mutual relations between nations bind their rulers directly, and all the individuals mediately. -- This results from the fact that rulers represent the societies which they govern.
{1} "The common law of nations, or the jus gentium of the old schools, comprised certain principles or rules of justice, which were recognized as laws in all or nearly all nations; not, however, by any compact either expressed or implied which they entered into. These laws were common to nations . . . not by convention but by coincidence of judgment. To this kind of law was referred the division of property also, the introduction of slavery; the transferring of supreme anthority from the multitude, to which it is primitively and naturally given, to a ruler, who, for the ends of government, impersonates the multitude the punishment of certain enormous crimes with death, etc. This common right of nations was understood to include not only general laws regulating internal order among the citizens of each nation; but other laws also which governed the intercourse of nations with each other. . . . International law as a special and complex department of jurisprudence, is of more recent origin." --Hill, Moral Philosophy, pp. 327, 328.