a letter, license, or document of one sort or other, issued by competent authority, permitting the bearer to enter into and remain in a particular country, or portion thereof, for an indefinite or a specified time, and sometimes also for a specified purpose.

Every independent state has the right to exclude such individuals as it pleases from its territory; and it consequently has the right to require all strangers entering, or desiring to enter, its territories to bring with them properly authenticated documents showing what they are, and (if required) for what purpose they desire to visit the country. (See Marten, lib. iii., cap. 3; and a host of other authorities.) Passports have been introduced principally with the view of preventing persons hostile to the government or institutions of a country from crossing its frontier. And this obviously is a power which all governments would wish were it in their power, to exercise and make effectual. But the widest experience has sufficiently proved that the facilities for travelling and for getting into extensive countries are now so great, that the regulations with respect to passports merely obstruct, that free intercourse between the well-behaved and peaceable inhabitants of different nations that is so advantageous, without throwing any serious obstacle in the way of the transit of dangerous or suspicious characters. The latter have either little difficulty in obtaining passports under false pretences, or in making their way without them; and it is found that the countries in which the regulations as to passports are enforced with the greatest strictness are those in which suspicious characters are most common. On the whole, there can be little doubt that their abolition would be of great public advantage, and that it would not be productive, either in France or elsewhere, of any injurious consequences.