don all pretence to national sovereignty. To yearn for the fragments of trade which might be left, would be to pine for the crumbs of commercial servitude. The boon, which we should humiliate ourselves to accept from British bounty, would soon be withdrawn. Submission never yet set boundaries to encroachment. From pleading for half the empire, we should sink into supplicants for life. We should supplicate in vain. If we must fall, let us fall, freemen. If we must perish, let it be in defence of our

RIGHTS.

To conclude, sir, I am not sensible of any necessity for the extraordinary interference of the commercial States, to control the general councils of the nation. If any interference could at this critical extremity of our affairs have a kindly effect upon our common welfare, it would be an interference to promote union and not a division -to urge mutual confidence, and not universal distrust to strengthen the arm and not to relax the sinews of the nation. Our suffering and our dangers, though differing perhaps in degree, are universal in extent. As their causes are justly chargeable, so their removal is dependent not upon ourselves, but upon others. But while the spirit of independence shall continue to beat in unison with the pulses of the nation, no danger will be truly formidable. Our duties are, to prepare with concerted energy, for those which

threaten us, to meet them without dismay, and to rely for their issue upon heaven.

Having received a commission as Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, and being upon my passage to St. Petersburg, accidentally driven by stress of weather into the harbor of Christiansand in Norway, I had the mortification to find there upwards of four hundred of my countrymen, the masters, supercargoes and crews of the greater part of thirty-six American vessels, belonging with their cargoes to citizens of the United States, captured and detained by privateers under Danish colors, and arrested for many months in that port. These vessels and cargoes, constituting a mass of property amounting to several millions of dollars, captured in the pursuit of their lawful commerce, and many of them belonging to merchants of the fairest and most respectable character, have not only been thus detained to the immense and almost irreparable detriment of their owners, but in many instances have been condemned in the lower prize court of Christiansand upon grounds, which I am persuaded can never be sanctioned by the higher court, and in many other instances the masters and crews of the vessels have been subjected to personal ill treatment.

On my arrival at Elsineur I learnt with great concern that this unfortunate situation was not

peculiar to my countrymen in Norway, but that sixteen other American vessels had been captured under circumstances nearly similar, and detained in this port and in Jutland. And although these have been all liberated, excepting two, even by the decision of the prize court in the first instance, yet they have all been harassed by the obligation imposed upon them to pay costs, and in some cases even charges to the captors, and by the appeal of the captors from the sentences of the lower court, they have been reduced to the alternative either of sacrificing large sums. of money to purchase an abandonment of the appeal, or of submitting to a detention still more expensive and ruinous.

In no instance whatsoever, either in Norway or here, have the captors been sentenced to pay damages, or even subjected to the payment of costs and charges, a circumstance the more striking, when connected with the consideration, that in some of the Norway cases the captors had not even a legal commission from his Majesty's government, authorizing to make the capture.

It has given me much satisfaction to be informed that for some time past the privateers, whose depredations and outrages had occasioned all those grounds of complaint, have been by his Majesty's orders suppressed. It might, therefore, be less necessary to remark, that their practice was to carry in without discrimination every

American that they boarded, without any examination of their papers whatsoever. But as this suppression must naturally have resulted from the demonstration having been made to his Majesty of the excesses committed by these privateers, may it not be urged, as an additional motive for a special interposition of his Majesty's government, at least to accelerate the final decisions of the prize courts, which can alone stop the accumulation of loss and injury to the Americans, who have been detained in a manner so little conformable to the most unquestioned principles of neutral right.

John Quincy Adams, Writings (N. Y., 1914), III. 221-223, 346-350 passim.

2. Bad Treatment of Neutrals

(1808)

By JUDGE JOHN LOWELL

This

Appointed a Federal judge by Washington. view of neutral rights may be compared with Randolph's argument (p. 159). Great Britain, struggling with Napoleon, had sympathizers in spite of her maritime aggressions.

THE dispute respecting neutrals will be best seen in a familiar point of view. When nations go to war, the principle of destroying each other's property, comforts and persons, is usually limited by certain rules; and the writers on the law of

nations collect these rules from the great facts which pass in the world, and from the theories which these facts will bear to have connected with them. For those rules, however, to be valid in any given case, it is clear that they must be observed on both sides: and that if one side departs from them, an equivalent, countervailing departure is authorized on the other. It is then that the interests of a third party come into view, namely, those of a neutral power. The neutral powers have a right to say, that if possible, matters ought to be so adjusted, as that their trade shall not be hurt. But if it so happens, that one of the belligerent powers goes to such extremities, that the other party cannot inflict equivalent restraints, without injuring neutrals, neutrals must suffer; but then they must be made only to suffer in a manner, which shall show that, not only the first, but the sole intention of every restriction is to hurt the enemy and not the neutral. Active neutrals, in general, may reasonably expect to enjoy as much trade as before the war; but if they are not content with enjoying as much trade in kind as before the war, and much more in quantity, but ask to be admitted to enjoy new branches of trade, with one party, (such as the colony trade) which will destroy the balance between the belligerents, then the other party may interfere to check this. Nor is it any thing unreasonable for the party which checks the colonial