[bushpilot1]

We are not challenging you..just asking for clarification..where did you read the book?

Why not take a few photos of this important discovery and post them.

How do you know the book you read is the same as the 1787 edition in Congressional library?

[devattel]

bushpilot1 said:

We are not challenging you..just asking for clarification..where did you read the book?

By all means challenge! But readers should be challenging this by reading it for themselves. I can not take photos of this version because it was read in 2007 and sold shortly thereafter for a small sum of over $10,000.

Had I realized the implications of the time, I would have taken photos of it. Regardless, it was and still is the same edition printed by Messrs. Berry and Rogers of New York. Either the Library of Congress is wrong in its information, or the books are the same.

This should also be the same edition that was permanently borrowed by George Washington in 1789. But it's not. The one in the photos provided by the New York Society Library shows their version was the 1760 edition printed in London. This very same book was checked out by over a dozen framing fathers, including John Jay, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. But why check this book out instead of using a more frequent edition? Why not choose the 1787 edition when the Federal Government and the New York Library were merely blocks away from MB&R of New York??? They were one of the major printing services for the federal government at the time.

The answer can be found in the history books themselves. Washington was to meet with his staff including Jay and Hamilton to discuss touchy diplomatic affairs with Britain. He checked out Common Debates vol. 12 and the 1760 edition of de Vattel's Law of Nations that very same day. Naturally, the 1760 version was British-centric, and it is clear just by looking at the differences between the British version of 1760, the 1787 edition, and the final edition of 1797.