If the recognition of a _de facto_ power were a duty imposed upon other nations by International Law, there would be no opportunity for objections founded on principle or policy. _But there is no such duty._ International Law leaves to each nation, precisely as the Municipal Law leaves to each citizen, what company to keep or what copartnership to form. No company and no copartnership can be forced upon a nation. It is all a question of free choice and acceptance. International Law on this head is like the Constitution of the United States, which declares, “New States _may be admitted_ by the Congress into this Union.” Not _must_, but _may_,--it being in the discretion of Congress to determine whether the State shall be admitted. Accordingly, in the exercise of this discretion, Congress for a long time refused to admit Missouri _as a Slave State_. And now the old Missouri Question, in more outrageous form, on vaster theatre, with “monarchs to behold the swelling scene,” is presented to the Christian powers of the world. If it was right to exclude Missouri, having only few slaves, and regarding Slavery merely as a temporary condition, it must be right to exclude a pretended nation, which not only boasts millions of slaves, but passionately proclaims the perpetuity and propagation of Slavery as the cause and object of its separate existence. Practical statesmen have always treated recognition as a question of policy, to be determined on the whole case, even where the power is _de facto_ established,--as amply appears in the Parliamentary debates on the recognition of Spanish America. If we go behind the practical statesmen and consult the earliest oracles of International Law, we find, that, according to their most approved utterances, not only may recognition be refused, but there are considerations of duty this way which cannot be evaded. It is not enough that a pretender has the form of a commonwealth. “A people,” says Cicero, in a definition copied by most jurists, “is not every body of men, _howsoever_ congregated, but a gathered multitude _associated through agreement in right and community of interest_.”[110] Again, he goes so far as to say, “When the king is unjust, or the aristocracy, or the people itself, the commonwealth is not vicious, _but null_.”[111] Of course a commonwealth that is _null_ cannot be recognized. This same lofty standard is of frequent recurrence in the testimony of the great Roman. But he is not alone. Grotius, who speaks always with the magistral voice of learning and genius, furnishes the just conclusion, when, after declaring that a state is “a complete body of freemen associated for the enjoyment of right and for their common benefit,”[112] he exposes the distinction between a body of men, who, being already a recognized commonwealth, are guilty of systematic crime,--as, for instance, piracy,--and another body of men, who, _not yet recognized as a commonwealth_, band