I have elsewhere had frequent occasion to remark, was wholly immaterial, provided a civil war then existed. That the proclamation had no unfriendly character may be reasonably inferred from the fact, that it was advocated by the best friends of the northern cause, including Mr. Forster, and was considered by Mr. Seward's minister, Mr. Adams, to be, in some respects, advantageous to the United States. "At any rate," he said in a dispatch to the Secretary of State, "the act had released the government of the United States from responsibility for any misdeeds of the rebels towards Great Britain. If any of their people should capture or maltreat a British vessel on the ocean, the reclamation must be made only upon those who had authorized the wrong. The United States would not be liable."

That, as a precautionary measure for the interests of British commerce, it was not premature, was judicially established in the "prize cases" decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. A capture was made as early as the 12th of May, of a British vessel, for running the blockade of Charleston, the President's message declaring the blockade, which was issued the 19th of April, having gone into operation the 30th of the same month. The British proclamation bears date the 13th of May.

Vessels and cargoes of the aggregate value of millions were captured on the ground of the violation of the neutral obligations of England, and the rule of continuous voyages was applied, in a more stringent sense than ever had been attempted by Lord Stowell, to cases of blockade and contraband, before any knowledge could possibly have been received, on this side of the Atlantic, of the existence of the Queen's proclamation.

If there was no belligerency, nothing can be clearer than that those captures were all unauthorized. Consequently, the proceeds of the prizes would constitute a legitimate claim against the United States.

Nor is it a slight evidence of the fallacy of Mr. Seward's position as to confederate recognition, that it has received no

sanction from the most eminent of our own publicists, President Woolsey having rejected it as altogether untenable. It was stated by the publisher, Little, in his testimony in the case of Lawrence vs. Dana, that Mr. Seward had refused to take copies of the second edition of Lawrence's Wheaton, as Mr. Marcy had of the first, for our ministers and consuls abroad, on account of the author's repudiation, branded as disloyal, of the Secretary's doctrines, and that Mr. Dana was employed to make a loyal book; yet Lord Tenterden, in the paper referred to, says that "the strongest arguments in favor of the recognition of confederate belligerency are to be found in the notes of Mr. Dana's eighth edition of 'Wheaton.'"

A still more important circumstance, in this connection, is the view uniformly taken of the matter by our minister in London. I have already referred to Mr. Adams's dispatch, showing that the recognition of rebel belligerency was not without its advantages for us. In another of 15th of April, 1867, he fully relieves himself from all responsibility for the policy enjoined on him. Having been asked his opinion by Mr. Seward, "in regard to what appears to be the only obstacle to arbitration left," he tells him that if the question of recognizing belligerency could be susceptible of being sub. mitted to umpirage the doing so would not be advisable for us. "The concession of a possibility that the exercise of that sovereign right of a State could be drawn into question might have the effect of tying our own hands in future cases." He adds: "As it is, the very agitation of that question in America, to which you allude as connected with the inchoate Irish movement, has the effect of undermining the foundation of our claim to complain in the present instance. It must be obvious to you that the adoption of the propositions pressed in Congress must have the necessary effect of weakening our chances of getting any valuable result at all from arbitration; for if we follow the suit of England when the respective positions come to be reversed, I do not perceive how we do not, pari passu, come to justify her conduct."

It is not my intention to be the apologist of Great Britain, but, in view of the pendency of the treaty before the Senate,

and of its impartial discussion, it may not be improper to suggest that, had England wished to avail herself to our detriment of the internal difficulties in which we were involved, she had many means of doing so without exposing herself to any claims for vindictive damages. No rule of international law prevents a country from opening its ports to privateers or to the prizes made by them or by public cruisers, provided it does it equally as to both parties, and though a prize court cannot sit in a neutral country, prizes taken into a neutral port may be condemned in the courts of the belligerent.

Now, in reference to either the United States or the confederates, as is shown in the abortive attempt of Mr. Seward to involve England and France in our contest by a convention with the United States adopting the rule of the "declaration of Paris," but which neither would sign without stating that it had no application to the existing war, it is apparent that England would not have considered the admission of privateers or their prizes into her ports as repugnant to her obligations as a party to that "declaration."

Nor were the United States invulnerable as to the efficacy of the blockade, especially when first established. When the "declaration of Paris" was made, it was announced in the English Parliament that, if the rule of blockade as there laid down were carried out, the whole British navy, in the event of a war, would not be adequate to the blockade of the French ports.

It would seem, even according to the official article inserted in the Moniteur, after the visit of Roebuck and Lindsay to Compiegne, that, had England consented, France was quite ready to acknowledge the independence of the confederates and to set at naught the blockade, which was sustained by vessels suddenly converted from merchantmen into ships of war, and in no condition to resist the combined navies of England and France. What the views of the Emperor were as to the southern confederacy appears in his letters to the officers sent out to Mexico, which were published at the time and never disowned. In one of them he says: "We have

an interest in this, that the republic of the United States be powerful and prosperous; but we have none in this, that she should seize possession of all the Mexican Gulf, dominate from thence the Antilles as well as South America, and be the sole dispenser of the products of the New World."

While I could never see any force in the alleged offence imputed to the Queen's proclamation, and have so avowed, I have always maintained that England was liable for the depredations of confederate cruisers, which had been built for them, or fitted out in English ports with the intention of being employed against the United States; and most especially was she so liable for the acts of such cruisers, wherever built or equipped, as had made either England or her colonies the base of hostile expeditions. And in considering this matter it is wholly immaterial what construction was given by her courts to her neutrality acts. Neither the obligation of Great Britain nor our rights are to be tested by the adjudications of her tribunals, especially of her common law courts, but only by the law of nations. This, indeed, is recognized in the regret expressed by her Britanic Majesty for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed by those vessels, and this avowal is made notwithstanding the decision in the Alexandra.

There is certainly no little difficulty in always determining what acts affecting belligerents a neutral State can lawfully do. The rule formerly was that both the State and its citizens might do what they pleased in aiding either party, provided they treated them both alike; and cases have occurred where a nation has been permitted to furnish to a belligerent military aid when that aid had been stipulated in a treaty antecedent to the war. A provision in the treaty of 1778 with France allowed her to carry her prizes into our ports, while those of her enemy were forbidden to enter except for stress of weather; and the difficulties which it occasioned are familiar to all conversant with our early diplomatic history.

2

It does not seem very easy to explain why a sale of munitions of war in a neutral country, by individuals, to a belligerent should be free from any violation of neutral duties, while the sale of a ship should not be so. Indeed, it has been held by the Supreme Court of the United States that an armed ship may be sent abroad to seek a market like any other commodity, and, when abroad, sold to a belligerent. The simplest rule for obviating all difficulties between neutral and belligerents would undoubtedly be to impose on the neutral government the obligation of preventing contraband from ever being shipped by its own citizens; and this would have the further advantage of abolishing the right of search, which, since the general adoption of the rule that neutral goods are safe in enemy's ships and enemy's goods in neutral vessels, only exists for contraband. This, it may be added, is the course advocated by many eminent publicists, and so far as vessels are concerned it would seem to have been adopted in the recent British Neutrality act.

By the law of nations, as now understood, though munitions of war may be sold in a neutral country to be used against a State at peace with it, yet it is held, and all the late controversy turns on considerations connected therewith, that a ship is not in the same category, and that though, as we have said, she may be sent abroad to seek a purchaser, she cannot be sold at home to a belligerent. I have not been able to see any other ground for the distinction than that which connects itself with the well recognized rule which forbids, in all cases, a neutral to permit his territory to be used as the base of hostile operations. There is here no difference as to the breach of neutrality, whether the capture be made in neutral waters by a vessel wherever fitted out, or on the high seas, when the cruiser has been built or fitted out in a neutral port. It is the power of carrying on war, when leaving the neutral port, which essentially distinguishes the sale of a ship in the neutral country from the sale of munitions of war, which, by themselves, would be of no avail. It is unnecessary to say that a mere technical evasion-as by sailing unarmed and