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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 SCHOOL OF LATO
 
 1/^ 
 
 // 

 
 /
 
 ENQUIRY 
 
 VALIDITY OF THE BRITISH CLAIM 
 
 A RIGHT OF VISITATION AND SEARCH 
 
 ^mtvicun vessels 
 
 SUSPECTED TO BE ENGAGED IN THE 
 
 AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 
 
 BY HENRY WHEATON, LL.D. 
 
 "I 
 
 MINISTER OF THE UNITED STAIiES AT THE COURT OF BERLIN — AUTHOR 
 OF " ELEMENTS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW," 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : 
 
 LEA & BLANCHARD, 
 1842. .
 
 T 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1842, by LEA &. 
 BLANCHARD, in the Clerli's Office of the District Court of the Eastern 
 District of Pennsylvania. 
 
 GRIGGS & CO., PRINTERS.
 
 ENaUIRY. 
 
 The message of the President of the United 
 States to Congress at the opening of the present 
 session, states in very brief, but significant and 
 decided terms, the ground taken by the American 
 Government upon the question of the right of 
 visitation and search recently claimed and exer- 
 cised by Great Britain in the African seas, and 
 other parts of the Atlantic Ocean, which can leave 
 no doubt as to the fixed determination of the cabi- 
 net of Washington upon that important subject. It 
 is hoped that the other matters in dispute between 
 the British and American Governments may admit 
 of a pacific and satisfactory adjustment, consistently 
 with the honour and essential interests of both na- 
 tions.* But the question as to the exercise of the 
 
 * The author of these sheets has recently published in the 
 *' Revue Etrangere et Fran^aise de Legislation,'' &c. an essay 
 upon the incidental question of the criminal prosecution com- 
 menced against Alexander M'Leod in the American courts, in 
 which the main question relating to the destruction of the steam 
 vessel, the Caroline, by order of the British authorities, in 
 Upper Canada, is also partially examined. This latter point is 
 understood to be included among the objects of Lord Ashburton's 
 
 5S9GoO
 
 right of visitation and search, in time of peace, upon 
 the high seas, in respect to the merchant- vessels of 
 a nation, which has not expressly assented to its 
 exercise, we fear may be attended with more diffi- 
 culties, both intrinsic, and those arising from pecu- 
 liar circumstances in the mutual relations of the 
 two countries. We say the ** question of the right 
 of visitation and search, in time of peace upon the 
 high seas, in respect to the vessels of a nation which 
 has not expressly assented to its exercise ;" for such, 
 we shall hereafter endeavour to show, is the true 
 nature of the pretension set up by Great Britain 
 on this occasion. It becomes, however, indispensa- 
 bly necessary, before entering on the question as 
 to the validity of this pretension, to endeavour to 
 dispel the thick cloud of prejudice which seems to 
 rest on the minds of many sincere friends of hu- 
 manity in Europe as to the principles asserted, and 
 the conduct observed by the North American nation 
 and its rulers in respect to the African slave-trade. 
 Summoned, as it were, at the bar of nations, to 
 answer the accusation of refusing to sacrifice what 
 they deem their just maritime rights, for the al- 
 leged purpose of suppressing a traffic so justly stig- 
 matized by every civilized and Christian people as a 
 crime against humanity, — the people and Govern- 
 ment of the United States have a just claim to be 
 heard before they are finally condemned by the 
 public opinion of the world on so grave a charge. 
 Had the allegation of insincerity as to their desire 
 to contribute by every means in their power, con- 
 sistently with the independence and honour of their
 
 national flag, towards the final and complete sup^ 
 pression of this odious traffic, — in the guilt of which 
 both Europe and America too long participated, 
 though (as we shall also attempt to show) in un- 
 equal proportions, — had, we say, this allegation been 
 preferred merely through the British party-press, 
 the writer of these sheets would not have deemed 
 it either necessary or proper to take up his pen in 
 order to vindicate the character of his country from 
 such a foul stigma. But as the same allegation has 
 been more than insinuated in public documents, to 
 which are affixed the signatures of statesmen for 
 whose character he feels the most unfeigned re- 
 spect, and in periodical works, understood to repre- 
 sent the views of at least one of the great parties 
 which divide the British State, — he cannot forbear 
 from endeavouring to repel what he must regard 
 as an unjust and groundless imputation. This be- 
 comes more especially necessary with respect to 
 the four great European Powers, who have recently 
 acceded to the compact proposed by Great Britain 
 for the alleged purpose of suppressing the slave- 
 trade, and with whom the United States have ever 
 been, and still desire to remain, on terms of the 
 strictest friendship. The maritime resources of 
 America are not for herself alone : they are for all 
 who have a common interest in the free navigation 
 of the seas, and the general balance of maritime 
 power. When these resources shall be more com- 
 pletely developed, they will, we trust, be devoted, 
 not to any mere selfish purpose, but to the support 
 of that great cause common to every civilized and
 
 commercial nation possessed of naval power inferior 
 to the greatest. 
 
 As the subject in question has no connexion with 
 the writer's official duties in the particular mission 
 confided to him, he will treat it with that freedom 
 which may become the citizen of a free state, but, 
 at the same time, with all the deference due to those 
 from whom he is constrained to differ, whether offi- 
 cial persons or others. 
 
 In order to dissipate the prejudices which have 
 gathered over this subject, it becomes necessary 
 to revert to the original progress of the traffic 
 in question, so far as the United States and Great 
 Britain are both concerned. 
 
 The testimony of authentic history attests the 
 notorious facts, that the African slave-trade was 
 carried on by the British nation for more than 
 two centuries under the patronage of its Govern- 
 ment, and protected by charters of monopoly and 
 public treaties, not for the supply of their own 
 colonies merely, but those of France and Spain, 
 before even the slightest effi)rt had been made 
 to awaken the public mind to a sense of its enor- 
 mous iniquity. Under the first Stuart kings of 
 England, charters were granted incorporating joint- 
 stock companies, endowed with the exclusive privi- 
 lege of carrying on trade with Africa. The ope- 
 rations of these companies were sustained by all 
 the power and patronage of the British Govern- 
 ment, both in legislative measures and diplomatic 
 acts. The memorable treaty of Utrecht, 1713, — 
 by which the Spanish succession-war was termi-
 
 nated, the balance of power in Europe confirmed, 
 and the maritime law of nations definitively set- 
 tled, — so far as depending on conventions, granted 
 "to her Britannic Majesty, and to the company 
 of her subjects established for that purpose (the 
 South Sea Company,) as well the subjects of 
 Spain, as all others being excluded, the contract 
 for introducing negroes into several parts of the 
 dominions of his Catholic Majesty in America 
 (commonly called El facto de el Assiento de negros,) 
 at the rate of 4800 negroes yearly, for the space of 
 thirty years successively."* 
 
 In the debate which took place in the House of 
 Commons on the 16th of June, 1815, relating to 
 the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna respect- 
 ing this matter, Lord Brougham stated, that " by 
 the treaty of Utrecht, which the execrations of ages 
 have left inadequately censured. Great Britain was 
 content to obtain, as the whole price of Ramillies 
 and Blenheim, an additional share of the accursed 
 slave-trade." 
 
 Mr. C. Grant said in the House of Commons 
 on the 9th February, 1818, that " In the beginning 
 of the last century we deemed it a great advantage 
 to obtain by the Assiento contract the right of sup- 
 plying with slaves the possessions of that very 
 power we were now paying for abolishing the trade. 
 During the negotiations which preceded the peace 
 
 * Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, signed at Utrecht, 
 1713, between Great Britain and Spain, art. 12. — (Dumont, Tom. 
 viii. P. ii. p. 344.)
 
 of Aix-la-Chapelle we higgled for four years longer 
 of this exclusive trade; and in the treaty of Madrid 
 we clung- to the last remains of the Assiento con- 
 tract."* 
 
 The principal object, however, of the slave-trade, 
 so long carried on by Great Britain, was the supply 
 of her own colonies in North America and the 
 West Indies. The British settlers in the colonies, 
 which now form the five southern states of the 
 American union, were naturally tempted by the 
 example of the West-Indian planters to substitute 
 for white servants the labour of African slaves, 
 better fitted by their physical constitutions to en- 
 dure the toil of cultivating, under a burning sun, 
 the rich soil of that region. The desire to obtain 
 an ample supply of these labourers was powerfully 
 stimulated by the encouragement of the British 
 Government, which sought by this means, at once, 
 to increase the amount of colonial produce for 
 home consumption and re-exportation, and to dis- 
 courage the emigration of its European subjects to 
 the New World, where they were but too much dis- 
 posed to seek refuge from the oppression of the 
 Restoration. " On the accession of Charles II.," 
 says Davenant, " a representation being made to 
 him that the British plantations in America were 
 by degrees advancing to such a condition as neces- 
 sarily required a greater yearly supply of servants 
 and labourers than could well be spared from Eng- 
 land, without the danger of depopulating his ma- 
 
 * Wabh's " Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain re- 
 specting the United States," second edition, p. 327.
 
 jesty's native dominions, his majesty did (upon 
 account of supplying these plantations with negroes) 
 publicly invite all his subjects to the subscription 
 of a new joint-stock for recovering and carrying on 
 the trade to Africa."* 
 
 The southern colonists yielded with too much 
 facility to the temptation thus held out to them of 
 being relieved from the wasting labour of the field, 
 under a burning sun, and with respect to one par- 
 ticular species of cultivation (that of rice,) in a 
 marshy soil, whose pestilent exhalations are fatal 
 to whites ; whilst they were thus left with leisure 
 and the means of providing for their defence against 
 the incursion of a savage foe.f Not so with the 
 settlers of New England. They stood less in need 
 of this class of servants, and therefore, more readily 
 listened to the voice of conscience. The colony of 
 Massachusetts, as early as 1645, enacted a lav/ 
 prohibiting the buying and selling of slaves, *' ex- 
 cept those taken in lawful war, or reduced to ser- 
 vitude for their crimes by a judicial sentence ;" and 
 these were to be allowed "the same privileges as 
 were allowed hy the law of Moses.'''' This pro- 
 hibition, with its exception conceived in the spirit 
 of Puritanism, must have fallen into disuse, since 
 we find that in 1703 the legislature of Massachu- 
 setts imposed a heavy duty on negroes imported 
 into that colony. And in 1767 they attempted to 
 
 * Davenant's AVorks, vol. v. " Reflections on the African 
 
 Slave-Trade." 
 
 t Walsh's " Appeal," p. JIO. 
 o
 
 10 
 
 establish a duty equivalent to the absolute prohibi- 
 tion of the introduction of slaves, which was defeated 
 by the opposition of the council appointed by the 
 crown. Had the bill passed the two branches of 
 the legislature, it must have been ultimately de- 
 stroyed by the negative of the governor, as all the 
 royal govenors had express instructions from the 
 British Cabinet to reject bills of that description.* 
 
 The colonial legislatures of Pennsylvania and 
 New Jersey followed the example of New England 
 in seeking to interdict the farther importation of 
 African slaves by prohibitive duties. But the in- 
 fluence of the African Company, and other slave- 
 traders in the mother country, w^as ever found ade- 
 quate to cause their enactments to be rejected by 
 the Crown. It is stated by Lord Brougham, in that 
 celebrated work on the *' Colonial Policy of the 
 European Powers," which at an early period of his 
 brilliant career, earned for him the highest reputa- 
 tion in economical science, that "Every measure 
 proposed by the colonial legislatures, which did not 
 meet the entire concurrence of the British cabinet, 
 was sure to be rejected in the last instance by the 
 Crown. In the colonies, the direct power of the 
 Crown, backed by all the resources of the mother 
 country, prevented any measure obnoxious to the 
 Crown from being carried into effect, even by the 
 unanimous efforts of the colonial legislature. If 
 
 * See Massachusetts Hist. Coll. for Belknap's account of 
 Slavery in that province. See also, Gordon's " Hist, of the Am. 
 Rev." Vol. V. letter 2.
 
 11 
 
 examples were required, we might refer to the his- 
 tory of the abolition of the slave-trade in Virginia. 
 A duty on the importation of negroes had been 
 imposed, amounting to a prohibition. One Assem- 
 bly, induced by a temporary peculiarity of circum- 
 stances, repealed this law by a bill which received 
 the immediate sanction of the Crown. But never 
 afterwards could the royal assent be obtained to a 
 renewal of the duty; although, as we are told by 
 Mr. Jefferson, all manner of expedients were tried 
 for this purpose, by almost every subsequent Assem- 
 bly that met under the colonial government. The 
 very first Assembly that met under the new con- 
 stitution finally prohibited the traffic."* 
 
 Edmund Burke, in his celebrated speech on con- 
 ciliation with America, recognised her "refusal to 
 deal any more in the inhuman traffic of the Negro 
 slaves, as one of the causes of her quarrel with Great 
 Britain." And in the first clause of the indepen- 
 dent constitution of Virginia, " the inhuman use of 
 the royal negative" in this matter is enumerated 
 among the reasons justifying the separation of the 
 colonies from the mother country. f 
 
 * Brougham's " Colonial Policy," b. ii. § i. 
 
 t Walsh's " Appeal," p. 317. 
 
 In 1772, the Assembly of Virginia presented a petition to the 
 Crown, stating that the importation of slaves into the colony from 
 the coast of Africa had long been considered as a trade of great in- 
 humanity, and under its present encouragement they had too much 
 reason to fear would endanger the very existence of his Majesty's 
 American dominions ; that it greatly retarded their settlement with 
 more useful inhabitants ; and the Assembly presumed to hope that
 
 12 
 
 It is then not too much to assert that the institu- 
 tion of slavery, which has now become identified 
 with the social system of the Southern American 
 States, was originally established among them by 
 the selfish policy of the mother country, and was 
 perpetuated by the refusal of the metropolitan go- 
 vernment to concur in the measures necessary to 
 prevent the increase of the evil by importation. 
 We may even go farther, and afiirm, with the able 
 author of the " Appeal from the Judgments of Great 
 Britain respecting the United States," that the insti- 
 tution of slavery would never have existed in the 
 latter, or at least would have been abolished by the 
 
 the interests ofafeic would be disregarded when placed in compe- 
 tition with the serurily and happiness of such numbers of his Ma- 
 jesty's dutiful and loyal subjects ; and beseeching the Crown to 
 remove rill those restraints on the governors of that colony, which 
 inhibited their assenting to such laws as might check so very per- 
 nicious a commerce. Judge Tucker, in his " Notes to the Ame- 
 rican Edition of Blackstone's Commentaries," from which we 
 borrow this account of the petition, states that he had been lately 
 favoured with the perusal of a letter from Granville Sharp, dated 
 March 25th, 1794, in which he speaks of the petition thus : — "I 
 myself was desired, by a letter from America, to inquire for an 
 answer to this extraordinary Virginia petition. I waited on the 
 Secretary of State and was informed by himself that the petition 
 was received, but that he apprehended no answer vjoidd be given. ^^ 
 —Tucker's Blackstone, vol. i. pt, 2 ; App. x. p. 431. 
 
 In the Address of the two Houses of Parliament to the Prince 
 Regent in 1819 (hereafter quoted,) on the subject of the slave- 
 trade, it is distinctly avowed that Great Britain " Avas originally 
 instrumental in leading the Americans into this criminal course." 
 — Fourteenth Report of the Directors of the ^Qfrican Association, 
 p. G.
 
 13 
 
 efforts of the colonies themselves, if it had not been 
 for the counteracting power of the mother country. 
 The earliest denunciation of the iniquities of the 
 slave-trade proceeded from that province founlied 
 by William Penn ; and the great English apostle of 
 abolition has borne testimony to the fact, that the 
 writings which gave the first impulse to the benevo- 
 lent efforts of his religious sect in this cause pro- 
 ceeded from the same quarter.* Long before Clark- 
 son had succeeded in rousina: the Enorlish nation 
 from its apathy on this subject, — an apathy which 
 had been confirmed by selfish class-interests, then 
 enlisted in favour, as they are now enlisted against, 
 the slave-trade, Anthony Benezet, and a crowd of 
 other American philanthropists, had anticipated his 
 labours in the same field. f 
 
 No sooner was the independence of the Colonies 
 declared in 1776 than the American Congress passed 
 a resolution against the purchase of slaves imported 
 from Africa. The constitutional powers of this body 
 did not, at that period of time, extend to a legal pro- 
 hibition of the importation into the United States, 
 or of the trade in slaves between Africa and the Eu- 
 ropean West India Colonies. But the several state 
 governments of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New^ 
 
 * See Clarkson's " History of the Abolition." 
 
 t Speaking of the combined opposition to the abolition in Eng- 
 land, Clarkson says, " The slave-trade appeared, like the fabulous 
 Hydra, to have a hundred heads ; the merchant, tlie planter, the 
 mortgagee, the manufacturer, the politician, the legislator, the ca- 
 binet-minister, lifted up their voices against its annihilation."
 
 14 
 
 England, passed laws prohibiting both the foreign 
 slave-trade and the importation of slaves under the 
 severest penalties. On the establishment of the pre- 
 sent federal constitution, the Congress v^^as invested 
 with the power of prohibiting the foreign slave-trade 
 immediately, and the importation of slaves into all 
 the states of the Union after the \st of January, 
 1808. The abolition of the African slave-trade, so 
 far as American citizens are concerned, was thus 
 made a part of the federal compact, or fundamental 
 law of the Union ; and the powers thus given to 
 Congress were exerted in the law of the 22d of 
 March, 1794, which prohibited American citizens 
 from participating in the foreign slave-trade under 
 the penalties of fine and imprisonment from that 
 date, and at the same time anticipated the interdic- 
 tion of the importation of slaves after the time li- 
 mited in the new federal constitution. In 1807, 
 laws were enacted by the Congress, on the recom- 
 mendation of President Jeiferson, giving effect to 
 the latter branch of the constitutional power by the 
 actual prohibition of the importation of slaves into 
 the Union after the first of January, 1808. In the 
 same year, 1807, an act was passed which provided 
 that no vessels should clear out on a slaving voyage 
 from any port within the British dominions after the 
 1st of May, 1807, and that no slave should be landed 
 in the British Colonies after the 1st of March 1808. 
 And yet Lord Castlereagh was heard to boast in the 
 House of Commons on the 9th of February, 1818, 
 that on the subject of punishing the traffic as a crime, 
 Great Britain "had led the way." The truth is,
 
 15 
 
 that the American federal government had inter- 
 dicted the foreign slave-trade thirteen years before 
 Great Britain ; that they had made it " punishable 
 as a crime" seven years before; and established the 
 period of non-importation into the Union four years 
 sooner than that assigned by Great Britain for her 
 Colonies.* 
 
 Denmark abolished, in 1792, both the foreign 
 slave-trade and the importation into her Colonies, — 
 both prohibitions to take effect in 1804. So that, 
 in fact, America preceded all other nations in abo- 
 lishing the foreign slave-trade; and all others, ex- 
 cept Denmark, in prohibiting the importation, and 
 actually preceded Great Britain in making the 
 traffic a criminal offence. 
 
 Nor did the American interdiction remain a dead 
 letter. It has been executed by the penal sanctions 
 provided in the above laws, with the auxiliary aid 
 of a naval force on the American coasts M^hich had 
 been specially provided in the act of 1794. The 
 operations of this force have been since extended to 
 the African and West Indian Seas. 
 
 On the 20th April, 1818, an additional act was 
 passed increasing the penalties of the former law. 
 And on the 1st March, 1819, a law of Congress 
 was passed, punishing the offence of importing 
 African slaves with death. 
 
 The general traffic was afterwards declared to 
 be piracy, by the act of Congress of the 15th May, 
 
 * Walsh's "Appeal," p. 323.
 
 16 
 
 1820.* But the piracy thus created by municipal 
 statute must not be confounded with piracy under 
 the law of nations. All that is meant is, that the 
 offence is visited with the pains and penalties of 
 piracy. 
 
 In point of fact, no considerable hnportation of 
 African slaves into the United States has taken 
 place since it was prohibited in 1808. Public opi- 
 nion stio^matizinff the traffic as a crime asjainst hu- 
 manity, and the particular interest of the southern 
 states against augmenting the dangerous black po- 
 pulation, which already increases by natural means 
 more rapidly than the white, have combined to sti- 
 mulate the zeal of the public authorities and of the 
 naval commanders to whom this service has been 
 
 * In the Supplement to the Ffteenth Annual Report of the Di- 
 rectors of the African Association, the committee state: — "America 
 alone has practically seconded our efforts with cordiality. But 
 even this power, anxious as the committee believe her to be in 
 her wishes to destroy this enormous evil, in which too many of 
 her subjects still participate, is restrained by certain constitutional 
 considerations from that full co-operation which is necessary to 
 its effectual repression. If, however, the report shall be con- 
 firmed, that she has, by a legislative enactment, stamped the 
 slave-trade with the brand of piracy, and subjected every citizen 
 of the United States, as well as every foreigner sailing under the 
 American flag, Avho shall be engaged in carrying it on, to capital 
 punishment, she will have elevated her character to a height to 
 which other nations may look with envy; and she will have set 
 an example which Great Britain, the committee cannot doubt, 
 will be among the very first to imitate, and which must, sooner 
 or later, become a part of the universal code of the civilized 
 world."— P. 8.
 
 17 
 
 confided. If their efforts have not been completely 
 successful in effectually suppressing the foreign 
 slave-trade, and if some few American vessels and 
 citizens are still employed in transporting slaves 
 from the coast of Africa to Brazil and the Spanish 
 West India colonies, it is owing to the same cir- 
 cumstances which have hitherto baffled the efforts 
 of other governments to prevent such a fraudulent 
 abuse of their flag. The abolition of the slave-trade 
 by Great Britain slowly won its way to public fa- 
 vour through innumerable difficulties, both within 
 and without the walls of parliament. We have 
 already seen what powerful interests, political and 
 commercial, were combined to retard, and if possi- 
 ble to defeat, the measure. The abolition-bill, car- 
 ried through the Commons by the exertions of Mr. 
 Wilberforce in 1804, was immediately thrown out 
 by the Lords, and the next year was again lost in 
 the Commons. It was ultimately carried under the 
 auspices of the coalition ministry of Mr. Fox and 
 Lord Grenville, who, though transformed into poli- 
 tical enemies on the breaking out of the war with 
 France 1793, had ever continued the zealous and 
 eloquent advocates of the abolition. This ministry, 
 which might be considered a happy accident in the 
 progress of the cause, did not long survive the 
 death of Mr. Fox, which followed within a few 
 months that of his great rival. His colleague, 
 Lord Grenville, had barely time to hurry the mea- 
 sure through parliament before the cabinet was 
 dissolved; and- it is remarked by Clarkson, that 
 though the bill had now passed both houses, 
 3
 
 18 
 
 " There was an awful fear lest it should not receive 
 the royal assent before the Grenville ministry was 
 dissolved." 
 
 This fear might well seem reasonable, since, as 
 we are told by Lord Brougham, " The court was 
 decidedly against abolition. George III. always 
 regarded the question with abhorrence, as savour- 
 ing of innovation, — and innovation in a part of 
 his empire connected with his earliest and most 
 rooted prejudices, the colonies! The courtiers 
 took, as is their wont, the colour of their senti- 
 ments from him. The peers were of the same opi- 
 nion."* 
 
 The measure was, at last, reluctantly sanctioned 
 by the Crown; and so long as the mighty struggle 
 between Great Britain and her Continental enemies 
 continued, it was sought to be executed, so far as 
 neutral countries were concerned (except Portu- 
 gal,) by the exercise of the belligerent right of visi- 
 tation and search. France, Spain, and Holland, 
 were cut off from participating in the slave-trade 
 by the mere operation of the war itself The en- 
 lightened British cabinet of 1806 foresaw that if 
 they should be able to carry the measure of abolition, 
 the restoration of peace must be coupled with the 
 restitution of the colonies, or a greater part of the 
 colonies, conquered by Great Britain from her ene- 
 mies, France, Spain, and Holland. In the abortive 
 negotiation for peace undertaken by Mr. Fox in 
 
 * Brougham, " Statesmen who flourished in the Reign of 
 George III.," p. 154. Paris ed.
 
 19 
 
 1806, an attempt was made to induce France to 
 join with Great Britain in abolishing the slave- 
 trade. In the account given by Mr. Fox's ambas- 
 sador, Lord Lauderdale, in parliament, of the causes 
 of the failure of this negotiation, the latter stated, 
 that on his urging with the French ministers, M. 
 de Champagny and General Clarke, the joint abo- 
 lition of the slave-trade, he was answered, " That 
 England, with her colonies well stocked with 
 negroes, and affording a larger produce, might 
 abolish the trade without inconvenience ; but that 
 France, with colonies ill stocked, and deficient in 
 produce, could not abolish it without conceding to 
 us the greatest advantages, and sustaining a propor- 
 tionate loss."* 
 
 In the year 1808, Spain and Portugal threw 
 themselves into the arms of Gre^t Britain for pro- 
 tection against the aggressive attack of Napoleon, 
 under circumstances apparently favourable to the 
 adhesion of these countries to the measures deemed 
 necessary to give effect to the abolition. The rela- 
 tions of peace and amity between Great Britain and 
 Spain being restored, the measure could no longer 
 be executed against vessels saihng under the Spanish 
 flag by the ordinary means of the belhgerent right 
 of visitation and search; for the novel distinction of 
 a right to ascertain the character of the suspected 
 vessel, by an examination of her papers and equip- 
 ments, (which we shall hereafter endeavour to show 
 is a distinction without a difference,) had not yet 
 
 * Gobbet's " Parliamentary Debates," 1807, vol. viii.
 
 20 
 
 been invented, or even so much as hinted at in the 
 writings of any British civiUan, the decisions of any 
 British judge, or in official documents signed by 
 any British statesman. The aboUtion could not be 
 lawfully executed against vessels sailing under the 
 Portuguese flag by exercising the belligerent right 
 of search, because Portugal had secured to herself 
 by an ancient treaty, then still subsisting, an ex- 
 emption from the exercise of the right of search 
 for enemy's property as constantly maintained by 
 Great Britain towards other neutral powers. Rea- 
 sons of temporary policy prevented the British cabi- 
 net of 1808-9 from even remonstrating with the 
 Spanish government of the Cortes against its being 
 carried on under their flao'. "It would have been 
 
 o 
 
 unwisC)^ said Mr. Canning in the House of Com- 
 mons, " to have taken a high tone with them in the 
 day of their distress ; a strong remonstrance on this 
 subject would have gone with too much authority, 
 and would have appeared insulting." But with the 
 feeble and dependent power of Portugal that high 
 tone was actually assumed ; and an order in coun- 
 cil was issued, authorizing British cruisers to bring 
 in for adjudication such Portuguese ships as might 
 be found carrying slaves to places not subject to the 
 crown of Portugal. Still the traffic continued ra- 
 pidly to increase, under circumstances of increased 
 cruelty, covered as it was by the flags both of Spain 
 and Portugal. On the 19th of February, 1810, 
 two treaties were concluded, one of alliance and 
 the other of commerce, between Great Britain and 
 the Prince Regent of Portugal, at Rio Janeiro,
 
 21 
 
 whither his Royal Highness had fled to seek shel- 
 ter from the storm of French invasion. By the 
 10th article of the first-named treaty, the Prince 
 Regent stipulated to prohibit his subjects from car- 
 rying on the slave-trade in any part of Africa not 
 belonging to him, and within which limits other 
 European powers had renounced it. Great Bri- 
 tain, at the same time, consented to tolerate the 
 traffic in the African possessions of Portugal, in re- 
 turn for other concessions secured to her in the 
 commercial treaty. One of the most important of 
 these was the consent of Portugal to suppress the 
 stipulations contained in the ancient treaty con- 
 cluded between the English Commonwealth, under 
 the Protector Cromwell, and the Portuguese crown, 
 in 1654, by which the principle of free ships, free 
 goods, was recognised by England in favour of the 
 Portuguese flag.* For more than a century and a 
 half this stipulation had continued to exempt Portu- 
 guese ships from the exercise of the belligerent right 
 of visiting and searching for enemy's property, as 
 asserted by Great Britain ; which power thus rid 
 herself of the last remaining treaty, by which she 
 had been bound to respect the principle of free 
 ships, free goods, asserted by most of the Continental 
 nations. 
 
 The recent armed neutrality of 1800 had, doubt- 
 less, convinced her of the dangers to her maritime 
 ascendancy which lurked under a concession origi- 
 
 * Schoell, "Ilistoire Abregee des Traitts dc Paix," torn x. 
 pp. 43-45.
 
 22 
 
 nally made to Portugal as the price of exclusive 
 commercial privileges to British subjects. The 
 treaty of Utrecht, 1713, by M^hich the rule oi free 
 ships, free goods, had been adopted between Great 
 Britain, France, and Holland, and which had been 
 constantly renewed at every successive peace be- 
 tween these maritime powers down to the French 
 Revolution, was swept away from the European 
 code of public law, by that mighty tempest. On 
 the rupture which took place between Great Britain 
 and Russia, in consequence of the British attack on 
 Copenhagen in 1807, the Russian government pub- 
 lished, on the 20th of October of that year, a decla- 
 ration, ''proclaiming anew the principles of the 
 armed neutrality, that monument of the Empress 
 Catherine," and engaging '■'■never to depart from that 
 system.'" In answer to this declaration, the British 
 government on the J 8th December, 1807, "pro- 
 claimed anew those principles of maritime law, 
 against which was directed the armed neutrality 
 under the auspices of the Empress Catherine ;" and 
 also stated that it was " the right, and at the same 
 time the duty, of his Britannic Majesty to maintain 
 those principles, which he was determined to main- 
 tain, w^ith the aid of Divine Providence, against 
 every confederacy whatever."* 
 
 This great controversy respecting the rights of 
 neutral navigation thus remained undecided ; and 
 Great Britain not only provided, by the treaties of 
 1810 with Portugal, against the danger which 
 
 * Martens, " Manuel Diplomatique sur les Droits des Neutres 
 sur Mer," p. 69.
 
 23 
 
 might lurk in the stipulations of her ancient treaty 
 with the same power, but she secured the incidental 
 means of executing her prohibition of the slave- 
 trade without doing direct violence to Portuguese 
 independence. 
 
 Notwithstanding Great Britain thus continued 
 to exercise the uncontested right of search against 
 all neutral powers, and to exclude the flag of her 
 enemies from the traffic in slaves, by the mere 
 operation of the war itself, the annual reports of 
 the African Institution in London conclusively 
 show, that the traffic, thus totally interdicted to 
 British subjects and American citizens, by the re- 
 spective laws of both countries ; to the enemies of 
 Great Britian by the incidental operation of the 
 laws of war ; and partially interdicted to her allies 
 by special conventional arrangements, continued to 
 be carried on with continually augmenting horrors 
 down to the general peace of 1814, not only under 
 the allied and neutral fl.ags of Spain, Portugal, and 
 Sweden, but in British vessels fitted out in the 
 ports of London and Liverpool under the neutral 
 flag and papers, but navigating on account of 
 British slave-traders.* 
 
 The prohibition of the slave-trade by the treaty 
 of 1810 between Great Britain and Portugal was 
 of very little importance, as the Portuguese pos- 
 sessions in Africa, south of the equator, exempted 
 from the operation of the treaty, were precisely the 
 markets to which the slave-dealers principally re- 
 
 * Reports of 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813.
 
 24 
 
 sorted for a supply of the wretched victims of their 
 detestable traffic. Sweden was the next power to 
 co-operate in the cause of abolition. The island 
 of Gaudaloupe, conquered from France, was ceded 
 to the Swedish crown, upon condition that the 
 importation of slaves into that colony and the other 
 possessions of Sweden should be prohibited. By 
 the peace of Kiel, concluded on the 14th of January, 
 1814, Denmark, which had prohibited the impor- 
 tation into her colonies long: before Great Britain 
 had adopted a similar measure, was made to stipu- 
 late the total prohibition of the traffic to her 
 subjects.* 
 
 Louis XVIII., who had declared that he owed 
 his restoration to the French throne (under Divine 
 Providence) to the Prince Regent of Great Britain, 
 was soon called upon to testify his gratitude by in- 
 terdicting the slave-trade to his subjects, who had 
 been excluded from it by the operation of the war. 
 He consented to prohibit the importation into the 
 French colonies by foreigners immediately, — but 
 insisted on tolerating it for five years longer, in re- 
 spect to his own subjects, in order to enable the 
 French planters to compete with the British islands, 
 which were already fully stocked. f The British 
 
 * Schoell, " Histoire des Traites de Paix," torn. xi. pp. 177, 
 178. 
 
 t Schoell, torn. xi. p. 178. In defending the stipulation in 
 the treaty of Paris, signed the 30th May, 1814 (first additional 
 article,) relating to the French slave-trade, against the attacks of 
 the opposition, Lord Castlereagh stated to the House of Com- 
 mons, that, " However he and the British nation might be in- 
 clined to make sacrifices for the abolition, he could assure the 
 House that such was not the impression in France, and that even
 
 25 
 
 government endeavoured to tempt France to con- 
 cede the immediate abolition by the offer of a sum 
 of money, or the cession of a West India island, but 
 without success.* 
 
 By the treaty of peace concluded at Ghent the 
 24th December, 1814, between the United States 
 and Great Britain, the trade was denounced as irre- 
 concilable with the principles of justice and hu- 
 manity, and the contracting parties mutually agreed 
 to continue to employ their best efforts to promote 
 its entire abolition. 
 
 We have already shown that the United States 
 have fully redeemed this pledge. 
 
 The Dutch government, by a decree of the 
 15th June, 1815, prohibited the slave-trade to its 
 subjects, but this prohibition was not then speci- 
 fically applied to the former Dutch colonies, since 
 they still remained in the possession of Great Bri- 
 tain by right of conquest. By the convention of 
 the 13th of August, 1815, the Dutch government 
 purchased the restitution of their colonies, except- 
 ing the Cape of Good Hope and Dutch Guiana, by 
 the entire prohibition of the slave-trade, including 
 the importation into the restored colonies.f 
 
 amorij^ the better classes of people there, Ihe British government 
 did not get full credit for their motives of acting. The motives 
 were not there thought to arise from benevolence, but from a 
 wish to impose fetters on the French colonies and injure their 
 commerce." 
 
 * "Ninth Report of the directors of the African Institution," 
 pp. 15, 16. 
 
 t Schoell, torn. x. p. 536; xi. p. 179. 
 4
 
 26 
 
 Lord Wellington, being reappointed British anri- 
 bassador at Paris in 1815, was instructed to propose 
 to Louis XVIIL (a second time restored to the 
 throne of his ancestors by the efforts of Great Bri- 
 tain and her allies) the prohibition of the importa- 
 tion of all colonial produce raised in the territories 
 of those countries which had not yet abolished the 
 slave-trade. The proposition was rejected by the 
 French Government, and the whole subject referred 
 to the Congress of Vienna.-* 
 
 During the negotiation of the treaty concluded 
 at Madrid, on the 5th of July, 1814, between Great 
 Britain and Spain, the British minister, Sir Henry 
 Wellesley (now Lord Cowley,) endeavoured to 
 cause an article to be inserted, by which Spain 
 should prohibit to her subjects both the general 
 slave-trade and the importation into the Spanish 
 colonies. But the British negotiator was only able 
 to obtain from the Spanish government the inter- 
 diction to its subjects of the foreign slave-trade to 
 other than the Spanish possessions, the Duke of 
 San Carlos remarking, that when the trade was 
 abolished by Great Britain, the proportion of ne- 
 groes to whites in the British colonies was as twenty 
 to one in number; that, on the contrary, in the 
 
 * Schoell, torn. xi. p. 181. The first additional article to the 
 treaty of Paris, 30th May, 1814, had already provided that France 
 and Great Britain should "unite their efforts at the Congress, in 
 order to declare by all the powers of Christendom the abolition of 
 the negro slave-trade as repugnant to the principles of natural jus- 
 tice and the enlightened age in which we live." — Martens, 3'om- 
 veau Becueil, torn. vi. p. 11 .
 
 27 
 
 Spanish colonies, there were not more negroes than 
 whites; that Great Britain had taken twenty years 
 to accompHsh the aboUtion, from the first incipient 
 stao-e of its bein^ carried in the House of Commons 
 in 1794 : from which the Spanish minister inferred, 
 that it was unreasonable to require of Spain the 
 sudden adoption of a measure which would be fatal 
 to the very existence of her colonies. After the sig- 
 nature of the treaty, Lord Cowley endeavoured to 
 tempt the Spanish government to concede a point 
 so important to Great Britain, by offering to con- 
 tinue the pecuniary subsidies which the deplorable 
 condition of the Spanish finances might seem to ren- 
 der indispensable. It appears from his despatches 
 that this final effort of the able British negotiator 
 proved fruitless.* 
 
 Lord Castlereagh was more successful in the ne- 
 gotiations he undertook with Portugal, and which 
 resulted in the signature of two conventions with 
 that power, signed at Vienna on the 21st and 22d 
 of January, 1815. By this arrangement, Great Bri- 
 tain obtained from the Portuguese government, for 
 pecuniary equivalents, the prohibition to its subjects 
 of the slave-trade on the western coast of Africa 
 north of the equator.f 
 
 We now come, in the course of our rapid histo- 
 rical deduction, to the memorable epoch of the Con- 
 gress of Vienna. The circumstances are notorious 
 which diverted the attention of this great Amphic- 
 
 * Schoell, " Recueil des Pieces Officielles, torn. vii. pp. 140, 
 143, 171. 
 t Martens, Recueil des Traites," torn. xiii. p. 93.
 
 28 
 
 tyonic council of -nations from the readjustment of 
 the maritime and colonial balance of power, and 
 from the renewal of those stipulations in favour of 
 the maritime rights of neutrals which had continued 
 to form a part of the public law of Europe from the 
 peace of Utrecht to the French Revolution. During 
 the abortive negotiation for peace with the French 
 republic at Lisle in 178G, the British negotiator, 
 Lord Malmsbury, proposed to renew, in the pro- 
 jected treaty, the stipulation which had been re- 
 peated at every successive peace concluded between 
 France and Great Britain since the treaties of 
 Utrecht, 1713, confirming the various articles of 
 those treaties. The British negotiator stated that 
 great confusion would ensue from the non-renewal 
 of this stipulation. The French Directory, how- 
 ever, rejected the proposal, doubtless from an appre- 
 hension that such an engagement might prove in- 
 consistent with the new territorial arrangements 
 which the acknowledgment of the French republic, 
 and its brood of sister republics, would necessarily 
 draw after it. Had either party expected, or sin- 
 cerely desired peace to be the result of this negotia- 
 tion, they would probably have more deeply consi- 
 dered the matter. Great Britain mis^ht have weighed 
 the light value of such a stipulation in restraining 
 the ambition of France, whilst France might have 
 considered the renewed acknowledsrment of the 
 principle of free ships, free goods, by the British, 
 government, as of much more importance to the 
 maritime interests of France than the mere possible 
 inferences respecting^ the Continental balance of
 
 29 
 
 power which might be drawn from the renewal of 
 the treaties of Utrecht. Be this as it may, it could 
 not be expected that the monarchs assembled at 
 Vienna, owing so deep a debt of gratitude to the 
 British government for its strenuous resistance to 
 " the enemy of Europe," and disturbed as they were 
 in the midst of their deliberations by the reappear- 
 ance of their common foe on the scene of action, 
 could think of providing against the possible abuse 
 of the immense maritime resources and naval power 
 which the results of the war had left in the hands 
 of Great Britain, and which she had taken care to 
 secure by separate treaties of peace with the mari- 
 time states, her late enemies. Nor could it be ex- 
 pected that the allied sovereigns would deny to 
 Great Britain almost any concession in favour of 
 her colonial interests, which did not directly affect 
 in an injurious manner the commercial interests of 
 those Continental states who possessed no colonies. 
 This was more especially to be looked for when 
 such concessions should be demanded in the name 
 of humanity and of the sacred cause which had so 
 long and deeply engaged the aifections of philan- 
 thropists throughout the Christian world. The only 
 wonder is, after all, that some more decisive mea- 
 sure was not obtained by Lord Castlereagh from 
 the Congress than the declaration of the 15th Fe- 
 bruary, 1815, denouncing the African slave-trade 
 "as inconsistent with the principles of humanity 
 and universal morality," and, at the same time, 
 leaving every state at liberty to determine for itself, 
 or by negotiation with others, the period when the
 
 30 
 
 odious traffic should be finally abolished. Even 
 this qualified denunciation of the traffic encountered 
 serious opposition from the ministers of Spain and 
 Portugal, who absolutely refused to listen to the re- 
 newal of the same proposition which had been be- 
 fore made at Paris, that in case the trade should be 
 still continued by any state beyond the term justi- 
 fied by real necessity, the dissent of such state 
 should be punished by the prohibition of the im- 
 portation, into the dominions of all the powers re- 
 presented in the Congress, of colonial produce, the 
 growth of any colony where the trade should still 
 continue to be tolerated ; and that they should only 
 permit the introduction of the products of such colo- 
 nies where the trade was unlawful; "or," as the 
 protocol stated, " those of the vast regions of the 
 globe which furnish the same productions by the 
 labour of their own inhabitants."* 
 
 The ministers of Spain and Portugal declared 
 that the introduction of such a system would give 
 rise to reprisals on the part of any State to which 
 it might be applied ; and they urged in favour of 
 the farther continuance of the traffic in human 
 flesh by their countrymen, that the British colo- 
 
 * Schoell, " Histoire des Traites de Paix," torn. x. pp. 187, 
 188. " These vast regions,'''' says Schoell, " refer to the British 
 possessions in the East Indies, the interest of Avhich, though their 
 express mention was studiously avoided in the negotiation, was 
 found to conform to the principles of humanity and religion. Eu- 
 rope will one day become tributary to these countries, when the 
 plantations of the AVest Indies shall be deserted for want of hands 
 to cultivate them."
 
 31 
 
 nies were fully stocked with slaves during the 
 long interval which elapsed from the first authentic 
 proposal until the final adoption of the measure of 
 abolition by Great Britain ; whilst the colonies of 
 Cuba and Porto Rico had been cut off, durinof all 
 that period, by the war, from recruiting their slave 
 population ; and the vast regions of Brazil still re- 
 quired an annual supply from the African coast to 
 keep up its cultivation. 
 
 The result was that Lord Castlereagh completely 
 failed in his endeavours to obtain the immediate 
 abolition, or to shorten the period for which the 
 trade should be carried on by France, Spain, and 
 Portugal. France still insisted on continuing it for 
 five years, nor could the Spanish and Portuguese 
 Governments be prevailed upon to fix a shorter pe- 
 riod than eight years.* 
 
 What the British Government could not per- 
 suade the Bourbons to do, the Emperor Napoleon 
 spontaneously did, on his return from Elba, by 
 his decree, March, 1814, immediately abolishing 
 the slave-trade in France and her colonies.f This 
 decree, wedged in between the first and second re- 
 storations, must evidently be considered as a despe- 
 rate attempt to conciliate England at that critical 
 period of his fortunes ; since, in the zenith of his 
 
 * Ninth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 
 pp. 18, 19. Klliber, Acten des Wiener Congresses, bd. iv. 
 s. 531. 
 
 t Ninth Report of the Directors of tlie African Institution, 
 Appendix C. p. 83.
 
 32 
 
 power, he had, as we have already seen, absolutely 
 refused the concession as fatally injurious to the 
 colonial interests of France.* Louis XVIIL, on 
 his return from Ghent, could do no less than con- 
 firm the Imperial measure, by a formal assurance 
 that " the trade was henceforth for ever forbidden 
 to all the subjects of his most Christian Majesty," 
 under the hand of that same Prince Talleyrand, 
 who once said that ''language was given to man to 
 conceal his thoughts." Whether the Bourbon kings 
 of the elder branch had conceived inveterate preju- 
 dices against the abolition, as a dream of revolu- 
 tionary philosophy which had been fearfully realized 
 in the bloody catastrophe of the flourishing colony 
 of St. Domingo, or whether they consulted merely 
 the feelings and supposed commercial interests of 
 their subjects, it would be superfluous to inquire. 
 It is, however, certain that the pretended abolition 
 
 * In their Tenth Report, 27th of March, 1816, the Directors 
 of the African Institution state that "the gratification they felt in 
 being able to lay before the subscribers the memorable denuncia- 
 tion of the slave-trade by the Powers assembled in Congress at 
 Vienna, was greatly damped by the consideration that all these 
 measures, however wisely planned or unceasingly urged, had 
 proved ineffectual; and that the French Government had deter- 
 mined to retain their slave-trade for the full term allowed by the 
 treaty of Paris. Very soon, however, after the declaration of the 
 Congress, there arose a cloud in the political horizon, which 
 seemed to threaten desolation to the civilized world. Yet, amidst 
 this gloom, a beam of light unexpectedly shone upon Africa. No 
 sooner had Buonaparte regained for a season the government of 
 France, than he issued a decree for the immediate and total aboli- 
 tion of the French slave-trade."
 
 33 
 
 remained for a long time unexecuted under the go- 
 vernment of the Restoration.* 
 
 It was during the negotiations undertaken by 
 the British Government with the French cabinet, 
 after the peace of 1814, that we first hear of the 
 proposition to concede the mutual right of search 
 as the only effectual means of suppressing the 
 trade. The Duke of Wellington proposed it to 
 Prince Talleyrand, but soon discovered " that it 
 was too disagreeable to the French Government 
 and nation to admit of a hope of its being urged 
 with success."! 
 
 By the treaty of Madrid of the 22d of September, 
 
 * Eleventh Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 
 pp. 1-10. Memoranda relating to the slave-trade in France in 
 1820. 
 
 t Duke of Wellington's Despatch to Lord Castlereagh, 5th 
 November, 1814. 
 
 Mr. Berryer, in his Speech in the Chamber of Deputies, Janu- 
 ary 24, stated that " the Duke of Wellington communicated on 
 the 26th of August, 1814, to the king's ministry a memoir tend- 
 ing to establish the principle of the abolition of the Negro slave- 
 trade; and, as a means of effecting this object, he demanded, 
 among other things, that there should be granted to the ships of 
 war of both nations, north of the equator, and to the twenty-fifth de- 
 gree of west longitude from the meridian of Greenwich, the permis- 
 sion to visit the merchant-vessels of both nations, and to carry into 
 port such, on board of which slaves should be found, there to be 
 confiscated according to the laws of the state to which they might 
 belong." 
 
 M. de Talleyrand answered, in the name of the King of France, 
 that he would never admit any other maritime police than that 
 which each power exercised on board its own vessels. — Journal 
 ties Debuts, January 25, 1843. 
 5
 
 34 
 
 1817, Great Britain purchased from Spain the im- 
 mediate abolition of the trade north of the equator, 
 and a promise to abolish it entirely after the year 
 1820, for the sum of 400,000/. Mr. Wilberforce 
 stated, during the discussion of the treaty in the 
 House of Commons on the 9th of February, 1818, 
 the great advantages of this bargain : " He could 
 not but think that the grant to Spain would be more 
 than repaid to Great Britain in commercial advan- 
 tages by the opening of a great continent to British 
 industry, — an object which would be entirely de- 
 feated if the slave-trade was to be carried on by the 
 Spanish nation. Our commercial connexion with 
 Africa will much more than repay us for any pecu- 
 niary sacrifices of this kind. He himself would live 
 to see Great Britain deriving the greatest advan- 
 tages from its intercourse with Africa." 
 
 The treaty of Madrid also contained the so much- 
 desired concession of the right of search, which had, 
 in the meantime, been yielded by Portugal, as to the 
 trade interdicted by her north of the equator. Du- 
 ring the same debate above referred to, great satis- 
 faction was expressed with this arrangement. *' The 
 introduction of the right of search, and of bringing 
 in for condemnation in time of peace, was declared 
 to be a precedent of the utmost importance."* 
 
 Lord Gastlereagh determined to avail himself of 
 this "precedent" without delay. He assembled the 
 ministers of the principal maritime powers of Eu- 
 rope in London in the month of February 1818, and 
 laid before them a paper, stating that since the 
 
 * Walsh's " Appeal," p. 37G.
 
 35 
 
 peace a considerable revival of the slave-trade had 
 taken place, especially north of the equinoctial line, 
 and that the traffic was principally of the illicit de- 
 scription. That as early as July 1816, a circular 
 intimation had been given to all British cruisers, 
 that the right of search, being a helligerent right, had 
 ceased rvith the war. That it was proved beyond 
 the possibility of doubt, that unless the right to visit 
 vessels engaged in the slave-trade should be esta- 
 blished by mutual concessions on the part of the ma- 
 ritime states, the illicit traffic must not only con- 
 tinue to exist, but must increase. That even if the 
 traffic were universally abolished, and a single state 
 were to refuse to submit its flag to the visitation of 
 the vessels of other states, nothing effectual would 
 have been done. That the plenipotentiaries ought, 
 therefore, to enter into an engagement to concede 
 mutually the right of search, ad hoc, to their ships 
 of war. 
 
 The ministers of the different maritime powers of 
 the European continent assembled in the confe- 
 rence, could not, of course, do more than engage to 
 transmit this proposition to their respective courts.* 
 
 On the 21st of February, 1818, Lord Castlereagh 
 addressed Sir Charles Stuart, the British ambassa- 
 dor at Paris, a despatch, accompanied with a memo- 
 randum laid before the conference of London, with 
 instructions to endeavour to obtain the assent of the 
 French Government to concur in adopting, with a 
 view to the more effectual suppression of the slave- 
 
 * Thirteenth Report of the Directors of the African Insiitution, 
 pp. 3-11.
 
 3G 
 
 trade, the mutual right of search which had been 
 conceded by Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. 
 But the proposition was rejected by the Duke of 
 Richelieu, on the ground that " the offer of reci- 
 procity would prove illusory; and that disputes must 
 inevitably arise from the abuse of the right, which 
 would prove more prejudicial to the interests of the 
 two governments than the commerce they desired 
 to suppress."* 
 
 The American minister was, of course, not invited 
 to the above conference. The United States have 
 hitherto, wisely as they believe, avoided as far as 
 possible entangling themselves in the complicated 
 international relations of Europe and the inextricable 
 labyrinth of European politics. Instead of appear- 
 ing in the great Amphictyonic councils of European 
 nations, where they might be outvoted by a prepon- 
 derance of interests and views having no connexion 
 with their policy, they have, in general, abstained 
 from mixing up their concerns with those of the Old 
 World. This policy, of course, may admit of ex- 
 ceptions, which will probably hereafter be multi- 
 plied as the facilities of intercourse between the two 
 continents of Europe and America are increased, 
 and their respective commercial and political inte- 
 rests become more blended together. But the sub- 
 ject now under consideration was not deemed by the 
 American cabinet of 1818, over which then presided 
 that most prudent of statesmen, Mr. Monroe, to con- 
 stitute an exception to those general rules which 
 
 * Supplement to the Fifteenth Annual Report of the Directors 
 of the African Institution, p. 77.
 
 had been laid down by Washington, and ever since 
 undeviatinglj pursued by the illustrious men his 
 successors, without distinction of domestic party. 
 
 Such being the known disposition of the United 
 States' government, the proposal in question was 
 communicated by Lord Castlereagh to Mr. Rush, 
 the American minister in London, together with the 
 treaties then recently concluded by Great Britain 
 with Spain, and other European powers, conceding 
 the right of search under certain regulations, and 
 inviting the American Government to join in the 
 same, or like arrangements. Mr. Rush took the 
 communication ad referendum to his government. 
 
 In the reply of Mr. Secretary Adams to Mr. 
 Rush's despatch on this occasion, the latter was 
 directed by the President to give the strongest 
 assurances to the British Government that the 
 solicitude of the United States for the accomplish- 
 ment of the common object — the total and final 
 abolition of the slave-trade — continued with all the 
 earnestness that had ever distinguished the course 
 of their policy in respect to that odious traffic. As 
 a proof of this continued earnestness, Mr. Rush 
 was desired to communicate to that government 
 a copy of the act of Congress then just passed 
 (act of the 20th of April, 1818,) in addition to the 
 prohibitory law of 1807; and to declare the readi- 
 ness of the American Government to adopt any 
 farther measures, within their constitutional power, 
 which experience might prove to be necessary 
 for the purpose of attaining so desirable an end. 
 But on examining the treaties communicated by
 
 38 
 
 Lord Castlereagh, it would be observed that all 
 their essential provisions appeared to be of a cha- 
 racter not capable of being adapted to the institu- 
 tions or the circumstances of the United States. 
 
 The power agreed to be reciprocally given to 
 officers of the ships of war of either party to enter, 
 search, capture, and carry into port for adjudica- 
 tion the merchant-vessels of the other, however 
 qualified and restricted, is most essentially con- 
 nected with the establishment by each treaty, of 
 two mixed courts, one of which to reside in the ex- 
 ternal or colonial possessions of each of the two 
 parties, respectively. This part of the system was 
 indispensable, to give it that character of reci- 
 procity without which the right granted to the 
 armed ships of one nation to search the merchant- 
 vessels of another would be rather a mark of vassal- 
 age than of independence. But to this part of 
 the system the United States, having no colonies, 
 either on the coast of Africa or in the West Indies, 
 could not give effect. 
 
 Mr. Rush was instructed to add that, by the 
 American constitution, it was provided that the 
 judicial power of the United States should be 
 vested in a supreme court, and in such inferior 
 courts as the Congress might from time to time, 
 ordain and establish. It provided that the judges 
 of these courts should hold their offices, during 
 good, behaviour, and that they should be removeable 
 by impeachment and conviction of crime or misde- 
 meanour. There might be some doubt whether 
 the constitutional power of the federal government
 
 39 
 
 was competent to institute a court for carrying into 
 execution their penal statutes beyond the terri- 
 tories of the United States, — a court consisting 
 partly of foreign judges not amenable to impeach- 
 ment for corruption, and deciding upon the statutes 
 of the United States without appeal. 
 
 It was farther stated, that the disposal of the 
 negroes found on board the slave-trading vessels, 
 which might be condemned by these mixed courts, 
 could not be carried into effect by the United 
 States ; for, if the slaves of a vessel condemned by 
 the mixed court should be delivered over to the 
 United States' government as free men, they could 
 not, but by their own consent, be employed as ser- 
 vants or free labourers. The condition of the blacks 
 in the American Union being regulated by the mu- 
 nicipal laws of the separate states, the United States' 
 government could neither guarantee their liberty in 
 the States where they could only be received as 
 slaves, nor control them in the States where they 
 would be recognised as free. 
 
 That the admission of a right in the officers of 
 foreign ships of war to enter and search the vessels 
 of the United States, in time of peace, under any 
 circumstances whatever, would meet with the uni- 
 versal repugnance in the public opinion of that 
 country. That there would be no prospect of a 
 ratification, by the advice and consent of the senate, 
 to any stipulation of that nature. That the search 
 by foreign officers, even in time of war, was so ob- 
 noxious to the feelings and recollections of the coun- 
 try, that nothing could reconcile them to. the exten-
 
 40 
 
 sion of it, to a time of peace, however qualified or 
 restricted. And that it would be viewed in a still 
 more aggravated light, if, as in the treaty with the 
 Netherlands, connected with a formal admission 
 that even vessels under convoy of ships of war of 
 their own nation should be liable to search by the 
 ships of war of another. 
 
 Mr. Rush was therefore, finally, instructed to 
 express the regret of the President, that the stipu- 
 lations in the treaties communicated by Lord Cas- 
 tlereagh were of a character to which the peculiar 
 situation and institutions of the United States did 
 not permit them to accede. The constitutional ob- 
 jection might be the more readily understood by 
 the British cabinet, if they were reminded that it 
 was an obstacle proceeding from the same prin- 
 ciple which prevented Great Britain, formally, 
 from being a party to the Holy Alliance; neither 
 could they be at a loss to perceive the embarrass- 
 ment under which the American Government would 
 be placed by receiving cargoes of African negroes 
 under the obligation of guaranteeing their liberty 
 and employing them as servants. Whether the 
 British cabinet would be as ready to enter into the 
 feelings of the American Government with regard 
 to the search by foreign navy lieutenants of vessels 
 under convoy of American naval commanders, was, 
 perhaps, of no material importance. The other 
 reasons were presumed to be amply sufficient to 
 convince them that the motives for declining this 
 overture were compatible with an earnest wish that 
 the measures concerted by these treaties may prove
 
 41 
 
 successful in extirpating that root of numberless 
 evils, the traffic in human blood ; and that they 
 were also compatible with the determination of the 
 American Government to co-operate, to the utmost 
 extent of its constitutional powers, in this great vin- 
 dication of the sacred rights of humanity.* 
 
 It will thus be perceived that the proposition 
 made by Lord Castlereagh to the American Go- 
 vernment to concede the right of search as the only 
 effectual means of attaining the common end both 
 governments equally desired to attain, was cour- 
 teously, but peremptorily, rejected by the American 
 cabinet. The pretension of exercising that right 
 upon American vessels, in any form, however miti- 
 gated, and under any name, however adapted to 
 conceal its real character, without the express con- 
 sent of the United States, was not then even so 
 much as hinted at by a British statesman, not want- 
 ing in bold daring on occasions suitable to the dis- 
 play of that quality. But Lord Castlereagh, with 
 all his political courage, was a man of too much 
 sagacity not to perceive that the deep wounds in- 
 flicted by the abuse of the right of search, which 
 had produced the war between the two countries, 
 then so recently terminated, were still too fresh to 
 allow the American Government, even if it had 
 been so disposed, to allow of its revival in any 
 shape and for any purpose, even by compact, much 
 
 * Mr. John Quincy Adams' Despatch to Mr. Rush, November 
 2, 1818. American "State Papers " (foreign relations,) vol. iv. 
 p. 330. 
 
 6
 
 42 
 
 less to submit to its gratuitous assumption in time 
 of peace. When the Spanish treaty was laid before 
 Parliament, his lordship stated that " The illicit 
 traffic arose out of the partial abolition, and out of 
 the facilities created by the cessation of belligerent 
 rights in consequence of the peace. It was for the 
 first time, he believed, in diplomatic history that 
 the states of Europe had bound themselves by a 
 mutual stipulation to exercise the right of search 
 over their respective merchantmen with a view of 
 giving effect to this laudable object. They had 
 now arrived (said he) at the last stage of their 
 difficulties and the last stage of their exertions. 
 One great portion of the world was rescued from 
 the horrors of the traffic. The approval of the 
 grant amounted to this, whether the slave-trade 
 should be entirely abolished or not?"* 
 
 Fortified with this concession, thus purchased 
 from Spain, Lord Castlereagh repaired to the Con- 
 gress of Aix-la-Chapelle, whither he was followed 
 by Mr. Clarkson, the great apostle of abolition. 
 The latter presented in November, 1818, an elo- 
 quent memorial to the assembled sovereigns, which 
 was supported by the former with the whole weight 
 of the power and influence of Great Britain. This 
 paper stated that, "In point of fact, little or no pro- 
 gress had been made in practically abolishing the 
 slave-trade. That all the declarations and engage- 
 ments of the European powers as to abolition, must 
 prove perfectly unavailing, unless new means were 
 
 * British Annual Register, vol. Ix. p. 19.
 
 43 
 
 adopted." The British minister, therefore, pro- 
 posed, as the only means left of accomplishing the 
 object avowed by the Congress of Vienna, 1st, The 
 general concession of a reciprocal right of search 
 and detention for trial, applicable to the merchant- 
 vessels of all nations who had prohibited the trade; 
 2d, The solemn proscription of the trade as piracy 
 under the law of nations. 
 
 These proposals were answered by the Plenipo- 
 tentiaries of the five great European pov^ers in sepa- 
 rate notes. France peremptorily rejected both pro- 
 posals, and suggested, as a counter projet, a plan of 
 common police for the surveillance of the trade, by 
 w^hich the several powers would be immediately 
 informed of the transactions of each other with re- 
 spect to it, and of all abuses practised within the 
 limits of their respective jurisdictions. 
 
 The proposal to declare the trade piracy under 
 the law of nations was also rejected by the three 
 great powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. " It 
 was evident," said the latter, "that the general pro- 
 mulgation of such a law could not take place until 
 Portugal had totally renounced the trade." 
 
 The above three powers also concurred with 
 France in rejecting the British proposal as to the 
 right of visitation and search. The answer of the 
 Russian Plenipotentiary, Count Nesselrode, stated 
 that it appeared to the Russian cabinet, beyond all 
 doubt, that there were some states whom no consi- 
 deration would induce to submit their navigation 
 to a principle of such great importance as the right
 
 44 
 
 of visitation and search {droit de visite.) He, 
 therefore, proposed, in lieu of the British projet, 
 the estabUshment of "an institution, situated at a 
 central point on the western coast of Africa, in the 
 formation of which all the states of Christendom 
 should take a part. This institution being declared 
 for ever neutral, separated from all political and 
 local interests, like the fraternal and Christian 
 alliance, of which it would be a practical manifesta- 
 tion, would pursue the single object of strictly 
 maintaining the execution of the laws. The in- 
 stitution would consist of a maritime force, com- 
 posed of an adequate number of ships of war ap- 
 propriated to the service ; of a judicial power, which 
 should adjudicate on all criminal offences relating 
 to the trade, according to a code of legislation on 
 the subject established by the common wisdom; 
 of a supreme council, in which would reside the 
 authority of the institution, which would regulate 
 the operations of the maritime force, would revise 
 the sentences of the federal tribunals, would cause 
 them to be executed, would inspect all details, and 
 would render an account of its administration to 
 future European conferences. The right of visiting 
 and detaining for trial would be granted to this in- 
 stitution, as the means of fulfilling the end of its 
 establishment ; and, perhaps, no maritime nation 
 would refuse to submit its flag to the jurisdiction of 
 this police, exercised in a limited and clearly de- 
 fined manner, and by a power too feeble to be 
 abused, too disinterested on all maritime and com-
 
 45 
 
 mercial questions, and, above all, too widely com- 
 bined in its elements not to observe a severe but im- 
 partial justice towards all."* 
 
 It may easily be anticipated by the reader that 
 neither the French nor the Russian substitute for 
 the British projet was acceptable to Lord Castle- 
 reagh. He proposed a counter projet limiting the 
 exercise of the right of search demanded to a term 
 of years. "He flatters himself," says the thir- 
 teenth Report of the African Institution, " that he 
 has made a considerable impression in removing 
 the strong repugnance which was at first felt to the 
 measure." t 
 
 All that could be obtained from the Congress 
 of Aix-la-Chapelle was a declaration that " the 
 negro slave-trade was an odious crime, the dis- 
 grace of civilized nations, and that it was a matter 
 of urgency to put an end for ever to this scourge 
 which had so long desolated Africa, degraded 
 Europe, and afflicted humanity."^ 
 
 The next we hear of this attempt to incorporate 
 into the maritime code of nations " a principle of 
 such great importance," as it was termed in the 
 above note of the Russian plenipotentiary at Aix- 
 la-Chapelle, was at the Congress of Verona. In the 
 despatch addressed on the 1st of October, 1822, by 
 Mr. Canning (who had become Secretary of State 
 
 * Thirteenth Report of the directors of the African Institution, 
 pp. 23-25. 
 
 :j: Report, pp. 1-3 
 
 * Fourteenth Report of the Directors of the African Institu- 
 tion, p. 1 .
 
 46 
 
 for Foreign Affairs in the place of the Marquess of 
 Londonderry,) to the Duke of Wellington, British 
 Ambassador at the Congress, it was stated that 
 whatever might be the advantage or disadvantage to 
 the British colonies, it was much to be feared that, 
 to Africa, the abolition by Great Britain had been 
 an injury rather than a gain. The slave-trade, so 
 far from being diminished in extent by the exact 
 amount of what was in former times the British de- 
 mand, was, upon the whole, perhaps, greater than 
 at the period when that demand was the highest ; 
 and the aggregate of human sufferings, and the 
 waste of human life in the transportation of slaves 
 from the coast of Africa to the colonies, were in- 
 creased in a ratio enormously greater than the in- 
 crease of positive numbers. Unhappily, it could not 
 be denied that their very attempts at prevention, 
 imperfect as they yet were, under the treaties which 
 then authorized their interference, tended to the 
 augmentation of the evil. The dread of detection 
 suggested expedients of concealment productive of 
 the most dreadful sufferings to a cargo, with respect 
 to which it hardly ever seems to occur to its re- 
 morseless owners that it consists of sentient beings. 
 The numbers put on board in each venture were so 
 far from being proportioned to the proper capacity 
 of the vessel, that the probable profits of each 
 voyage were notoriously calculated only on the sur- 
 vivors ; and the mortality was accordingly frightful, 
 to a degree unknown, since the attention of mankind 
 had been first called to the horrors of this traffic. 
 Mr. Secretary Canning added, that to these enor-
 
 47 
 
 mous and, he feared, even growing evils, they had 
 nothing to oppose but the declaration of the Con- 
 gress of Vienna ; their treaties vv^ith Spain and the 
 Netherlands, abolishing the trade definitively and 
 totally, and that with Portugal restricting the Portu- 
 guese slave-trade to the south of the line. It was 
 the truth (however lamentable or incredible) that, 
 by the testimony of the French Government itself, 
 there was no public feeling on this subject in France 
 which responded, in the smallest degree, to the sen- 
 timent prevalent in England ; that no credit was 
 given to the people or the legislature of that coun- 
 try for sincerity in those sentiments; that their 
 anxiety on the matter was attributed to a calcula- 
 tion of national interest ; and that a new law, founded 
 on a proposition from England for new restrictions 
 on the illicit slave-trade, would at this moment be 
 thrown out in the legislature of France. 
 
 The principal advantage, then, to be derived 
 from the union of sovereigns at Verona, according 
 to Mr. Secretary Canning, appeared to resolve 
 themselves into the following : — 
 
 1. An engagement on the part of the Continental 
 sovereigns to mark their abhorrence of this accursed 
 traffic, by refusing admission into their dominions 
 of the produce of colonies belonging to the powers 
 who had not abolished, or who notoriously conti- 
 nued, the slave-trade. 
 
 2. A declaration in the names, if possible, of the 
 whole alliance ; but, if France shall decline being a 
 party to it, then in the names of the three other 
 powers (Austria, Prussia, and Russia^) renewing
 
 48 
 
 the denunciation of the Congress of Vienna, and 
 exhorting the maritime powers who had abolished 
 the slave-trade to concert measures among them- 
 selves for proclaiming and treating it as piracy, 
 with a view of founding upon the aggregate of such 
 separate engagements between state and state a ge- 
 neral engagement to be incorporated into the public 
 law of the civilized world. 
 
 Such a declaration, it was added, as it assumed 
 no binding force, would not be obnoxious to the 
 charges which would attach to the introduction of a 
 new public law by an incompetent authority; while, 
 at the same time, its moral influence might mate- 
 rially aid the British cabinet in its negotiations with 
 other maritime states. It could have no difficulty 
 in consenting that subjects of the United Kingdom 
 found trading in slaves should be treated as pirates, 
 upon a reciprocal admission' of the same principle 
 by other powers. 
 
 All the powers assembled in the Congress united 
 in declaring their continual adherence to the prin- 
 ciples in favour of which they had pronounced 
 themselves since the Congress of Vienna ; and it 
 was agreed to record anew these principles by a 
 declaration analogous to that of the 8th February, 
 1815. But the particular practical measures pro- 
 posed by the British plenipotentiary to give effect 
 to this renewed profession of principles, were taken 
 ad referendum by the other plenipotentiaries, except 
 those of France, for the farther deliberations of their 
 respective courts. 
 
 The plenipotentiaries of France, MM. de Cha-
 
 49 
 
 teaubriand and de Caraman, explicitly rejected these 
 measures in a detailed answer to the Duke of 
 Wellington's memorandum, in which, after avowing 
 that " the French Government participated in the 
 solicitude of the British Government to suppress 
 a traffic equally reprehensible in the eyes both of 
 God and man," they proceeded to develope the 
 causes which rendered public opinion less decided 
 on this subject in France than in Great Britain. 
 A people so humane, so generous, and so disinte- 
 rested as that of France — a people always ready to 
 furnish the example of submitting to sacrifices — 
 deserved to have explained what might appear an 
 inexplicable anomaly in their character. 
 
 The massacre of the colonists of St. Domingo, 
 and the burning of their habitations, left, in the 
 first instance, painful recollections among those 
 families who lost relations in those sanguinary 
 revolutions. It might be permitted to call to mind 
 these calamities of the whites, when the British 
 memorandum painted with so much truth and 
 force of colouring, the sufferings of the blacks, in 
 order to prove that every thing which excites pity 
 naturally influences public opinion. It was evi- 
 dent that the abolition of the slave-trade would 
 have been less popular in England, if it had been 
 preceded by the ruin and murder of the British 
 colonists in the West Indies. 
 
 It might farther be remarked that the abolition of 
 this traffic was not decreed in France by an act 
 of national legislation discussed in the Tribune. 
 7
 
 50 
 
 It was the result of a stipulation in the treaty by 
 which France had atoned for her victories. From 
 that moment the measure was coupled in the eye 
 of the multitude with foreign considerations, merely 
 because they believed it to be imposed upon them ; 
 and it, therefore, became subjected to that un- 
 popularity which must ever attend measures of 
 compulsion. The same thing would have hap- 
 pened in any country where public spirit and 
 a proper degree of national pride are found to 
 exist. 
 
 A motion in the British Parliament, ever ho- 
 nourable to its philanthropic author, was finally 
 crowned with success ; but this triumph was 
 achieved after repeated rejections of the proposed 
 measure, although supported by one of the greatest 
 ministers England ever produced. During these 
 protracted debates, public opinion had time to 
 ripen and to come to an ultimate decision. The 
 commercial interest, which foresaw the result, had 
 time to take its precautions ; a number of negroes, 
 exceeding the wants of the colonists, were trans- 
 ported to the British islands ; and successive gene- 
 rations of slaves were thus provided to fill up the 
 void to be occasioned by the abolition of the traffic 
 when it should take place. 
 
 No such advantage was possessed by France. 
 The first convention on this subject between France 
 and Great Britain after the restoration, recognised 
 the necessity of acting with prudent caution in a 
 matter of a nature so complex. An additional arti-
 
 51 
 
 cle to the Convention allowed a delay of five years 
 for the entire abolition of the traffic. 
 
 It was farther stated in this paper, that the 
 French Government was determined to pursue 
 without relaxation the prosecution of the parties 
 engaged in this barbarous traffic. Numerous con- 
 demnations had already taken place, and the tribu- 
 nals had severely punished wherever the guilt of 
 the accused was ascertained. The British memo- 
 randum stated that " it would be dreadful that the 
 necessity of destroying human beings had become 
 the consequence of that of concealing a traffic pro- 
 scribed by the laws." This too just remark proved 
 that the French law had been rigorously executed; 
 and the cruel precautions taken by the violators of 
 the treaty in order to secrete their victims proved, 
 in a striking manner, the vigilance of the govern- 
 ment. 
 
 In respect to one of the particular measures pro- 
 posed by Great Britain, that of the introduction of a 
 new public law declaring the offence of being en- 
 gaged in the slave-trade to be piracy under the law 
 of nations, the French plenipotentiaries declared, 
 that " a deliberation tending to oblige all govern- 
 ments to apply to the slave-trade the punishment 
 inflicted on the crime of piracy, could not, in their 
 opinion, be within the province of a diplomatic con- 
 ference." 
 
 In reply to this suggestion, the Duke of Welling- 
 ton stated, in verbal conference, that his proposition 
 had no other view than to engage all the maritime
 
 52 
 
 powers who had abolished the slave-trade to con- 
 cert among themselves the measures to be adopted, 
 in order to declare this traffic piracy, and to punish 
 it accordingly. 
 
 M. de Chateaubriand rejoined, that the French 
 plenipotentiaries had perfectly understood that the 
 British memorandum required each government, 
 separately, to pass a law assimilating the slave-trade 
 to piracy ; but that they could not sign a declara- 
 tion in which this desire should be expressed, be- 
 cause they could not undertake to prescribe to their 
 government the title, form, tenor, or extent of any 
 laws. 
 
 The discussions at the Congress of Verona, thus 
 resulted in a mere repetition of the barren denuncia- 
 tions of the Congress of Vienna and that of Aix-la- 
 Chapelle. The three Northern powers of the Con- 
 tinent would not listen to the British proposition to 
 grant a monopoly in their markets of the colonial 
 products of such countries as had prohibited the 
 slave-trade, nor to introduce a new public law of 
 Europe by which the offence of engaging in the 
 trade should be considered as piracy under the law 
 of nations. France peremptorily refused to take 
 any new measures to suppress the traffic. 
 
 Such is the account given of these transactions in 
 the papers presented to the British Parliament. 
 But we are told by M. de Chateaubriand, in his 
 "History of the Congress of Verona," that in the 
 memoir presented by the Duke of Wellington under 
 date of the 24th November, 1822, the British cabi- 
 net expressed its regret that France should be the
 
 53 
 
 only one of the great maritime powers* which still 
 refused to accede to the arrangements concluded be- 
 tween Great Britain and other States, with the view 
 of conferring upon certain ships of war of the con- 
 tracting parties the limited right of search and con- 
 fiscation against merchant-vessels engaged in the 
 slave-trade. M. de Chateaubriand answered this in- 
 timation bj stating that the French Government 
 could never consent to acknowledore the ri^ht of 
 seatch. The national character, both of the French 
 and English people, was opposed to its exercise, 
 which, as between them, would be attended with 
 the most fatal consequences; and if proofs were 
 wanting in support of this opinion, they would be 
 found in the fact that during that very year French 
 blood had flowed on the coast of Africa. France re- 
 cognised the freedom of the seas for all foreign flags 
 to whatever lawful power they might belong : she 
 only contended for that independence, in respect to 
 herself, which she respected in others, and which 
 was consistent with her national dignity.f 
 
 Great Britain could hardly expect to obtain 
 from the Congress of Verona, at that period, this 
 so much-coveted boon, nor any of the other con- 
 cessions demanded in respect to a matter in which, 
 though the interests of humanity were deeply con- 
 cerned, the Continental powers perceived, that her 
 colonial and commercial interests were also in- 
 volved in the prosecution of the same cause. We 
 
 * It seems that Spain and Portugal were " great maritime pow- 
 ers," whilst Russia and the United States were not. 
 t Histoire du Congres de Verone, torn. i.
 
 54 
 
 say that Great Britain could hardly expect to ob- 
 tain these concessions from the European Congress 
 at that period, because she was strenuously opposed 
 to the main object for which it had been assembled ; 
 that is to say, in order to countenance the armed 
 interference of France in the internal aifairs of 
 Spain. The British cabinet had been gradually 
 detaching itself, ever since the Congress of Troppau 
 and that of Laybach, from the alliance between the 
 great Continental powers, so far as that alliance was 
 founded upon the claim of a general right to inter- 
 fere in the internal transactions of other states, in 
 order to prevent revolutionary changes in their 
 forms of government or reigning dynasties.* This 
 gradual separation from the Continental powers, on 
 a point of policy so vitally important to them, be- 
 gun by Lord Castlereagh (afterwards Marquess of 
 Londonderry,) under the administration of the Earl 
 of Liverpool, was continued and completed under 
 that of Mr. Canning. Great Britain did not oppose 
 by force, as the latter minister declared she might 
 have done, the armed interference of France in the 
 internal affairs of Spain ; in consequence of which 
 the constitution of the Cortes was overthrown, Fer- 
 dinand Vn. restored to the plenitude of his royal 
 authority, and British influence destroyed for a 
 time in that part of the Peninsula. But she ac- 
 knowledged the independence of the Spanish colo- 
 nies on the American continent, and, as Mr. Can- 
 
 , * See Lord Castlereagh's Circular Despatch of the 19th of Janu- 
 ary, 1821. (" British Annual Register," vol. Ixii. pt. ii. p. 737.)
 
 55 
 
 ning afterwards said, "called into existence a new 
 world in order to redress the balance of the old."* 
 This decisive measure, followed by the armed in- 
 terference of Great Britain in the internal affairs of 
 Portugal in 1826, disturbed the intimacy of her 
 relations with the great Powers of the Continent, 
 and rendered them still less disposed to yield any 
 point of peculiar interest to her without adequate 
 equivalents. This unaccommodating disposition 
 continued, as we shall hereafter see, until the French 
 revolution of 1830, by separating for a time France 
 under her new dynasty of the house of Orleans, 
 from the general European alliance, enabled Great 
 Britain to obtain from that power the concession of 
 the right of search, which was yielded to the influ- 
 ence of those philanthropic sentiments and unsus- 
 pecting confidence in British friendship which 
 marked that era. The treaty of the 15th July, 
 1840, relating to the affairs of the Levant, once more 
 attracted Great Britain within the sphere of the in- 
 fluence of the Northern powers; and prepared the 
 way for the treaty of the 20th of December, 1841, 
 by which the right of search was at last conceded 
 by those powers who had been formerly the great 
 champions of neutral maritime rights. By what 
 circumstances France was induced to accede to 
 this compact, it would be beside our purpose to in- 
 quire. 
 
 In the mean time the slave-trade continued to 
 
 * Mr. Canning's Speech in the House of Commons on the 
 British armed intervention in the affairs of Portugal, 11th Decem-r 
 ber, 1836. (" British Annual Register," vol. Ixviii. p. 192.)
 
 56 
 
 be carried on to an enormous extent, and with 
 circumstances of cruelty augmented by the very 
 measures adopted for its suppression. This noto- 
 rious fact is attested by the British diplomatic cor- 
 respondence upon this subject, by the Reports of 
 the African Institution in London, and by those 
 made from the committees of the American Con- 
 gress and British Parliament. No little proportion 
 of this traffic in human flesh and blood was carried 
 on under the Spanish and Portuguese flags with 
 British capital, on British account, and in vessels 
 built in London and Liverpool.* The trade had 
 been nominally prohibited by Spain to her subjects 
 from the 31st of May, 1820, on all parts of the Afri- 
 can coast, both south and north of the equinoctial 
 line; but Portugal still continued to cling to that 
 portion she had reserved south of the equator. In 
 1821, there was not a single flag of any European 
 state that could lawfully cover the traffic to the 
 north of the equator; yet down to the year 1830, 
 and we may add down to the present time, the 
 fraudulent importation of African slaves actually 
 continued, if it was not openly countenanced, from 
 the Rio de la Plata to the Amazon, and throughout 
 the whole West Indian archipelago. | The com- 
 
 * In the debate in the House of Commons on the 9th Febru- 
 ary, 1818, Lord Castlereagh said, " It would be a great error to 
 believe that tlie reproach of carrying on the slave-trade illegally 
 belonged only to the other countries. In numberless instances, 
 he was sorry to say, it had come to his knowledge that British 
 subjects were indirectly and largely engaged." 
 
 t Report of the House of Representatives in the American 
 Congress, 16th February, 1825.
 
 57: 
 
 mercial cupidity of individuals, the financial and 
 political interests of States, and the inveterate ha- 
 bits of ages, by which Africa has been condemned 
 to barbarism from the earliest records of history, 
 were too powerful to be overcome by the mere ope- 
 ration of laws and treaties, aided by the zealous 
 efforts of benevolent individuals and associations, 
 within the short compass of a few brief years. 
 "Man," says Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, "has 
 ever been the great staple article of exportation 
 from Africa, by w^hich chiefly her inhabitants have 
 acquired the luxuries of civilized life." That most 
 zealous, constant, and enlightened advocate of the 
 slave-trade abolition has recently retired from the 
 contest in disgust and despair (so far as the means 
 hitherto pursued for its execution are concerned;) 
 after having conclusively shown that what was true 
 in 1830 remains true to this day, and that no actual 
 progress has been made in the suppression of the 
 traffic, which, on the contrary, has rapidly increased 
 since the abolition, both in the numbers of its vic- 
 tims and the sum total of their sufferings.* This 
 
 * Sir T. F. Buxton, in his recent " History of the Abolition of 
 the Slave-Trade, " has, in our opinion, established, from conclu- 
 sive testimony and fair deductions, that more than 150,000 ne- 
 groes are now transported across the ocean from the eastern and 
 western coasts of Africa;* that the arms and other articles pecu- 
 liarly adapted to the slave-trade are still manufactured on the most 
 extensive scale in Great Britain; that the mortality of the middle 
 
 * Whilst Mr. Pitt and Mr. Vox computed the numbers carried over in 
 1792 at only 80,00U.
 
 58 
 
 should not, perhaps, discourage more ardent and 
 energetic partisans of the measure, if any such 
 there be ; but, at least, it should render them cau- 
 tious in selecting the means by which they would 
 seek to attain an object which has hitherto eluded 
 their grasp, and, like the mirage of the African de- 
 sert, fled before them as they seemed to approach 
 its borders. But above all, they should take care 
 
 passage is frightfully augmented by the very precautions which 
 are rendered necessary to escape from the vigilance of the cruisers: 
 and whilst double the number of human victims are sacrificed to 
 this accursed traffic than at the time when Clarkson and Wilber- 
 force began their philanthropic labours, each individual suffers ten- 
 fold more from the contracted space in which they are stowed, 
 every thing being sacrificed to fast sailing. He considers the mea- 
 sure of abolition as having totally failed, not for want of energy 
 and perseverance in its execution, but from a total mistake as to 
 the true means of accomplishing the object. His opinion is that 
 Great Britain will never be able to obtain the assent of all nations 
 to the exercise of the right of search for this object; and even if 
 she did obtain the assent of all, the advantage would be illusory. 
 That even if to this concession were superadded the introduction 
 of a new public law, by which the traffic should be denounced 
 and punished as piracy under the law of nations, it would be all 
 in vain; the enormous profits (more than fifteen per cent) made by 
 it affording a premium which counteracts every precaution which 
 can possibly be taken to execute the prohibitory laws and treaties. 
 He, therefore, concludes that the trade will never be destroyed by 
 the means heretofore devised. The African, until civilized, will 
 never cease to desire arms, ardent spirits, and other luxuries, nor 
 to purchase them in exchange for men, which have ever been the 
 great staple article of exportation from that continent. The true 
 means of repression to be adopted are to civilize, and Christianize, 
 and colonize Africa, by which the native chieftains would cease to 
 have an interest in dealing in human flesh.
 
 59 
 
 that among these means be not included an inva- 
 sion of the sovereign rights of foreign states, as in- 
 dependent of Great Britain as Great Britain is of 
 them. They should remember that their greatest 
 civilian has said, speaking of this very subject, that 
 " no one nation has a right to force the way to the 
 liberation of Africa by trampling on the indepen- 
 dence of other states ; or to procure an eminent 
 good by means that are unlawful ; or to press for- 
 ward to a great principle by breaking through other 
 principles that stand in the way."* 
 
 We have already observed that so long as the 
 European war continued, the British laws, abolish- 
 ing the slave-trade as to their own subjects, were 
 executed by means of the belligerent right of visita- 
 tion and search, so far as the neutral flag was used 
 to cover the illicit traffic still carried on with British 
 capital and on British account. Vessels captured 
 and brought in for adjudication under the exercise 
 of this right, though they might not prove to belong 
 to an enemy, were condemned, according to the well- 
 known fiction and formula of the Prize Courts, as 
 enemi/s property, in case of proof that they had 
 fraudulently assumed the neutral flag in order to 
 cover British interests in a traffic interdicted by the 
 British Parliament to those who were amenable to 
 its laws. On principle, it would seem that the bel- 
 ligerent right of capture and condemnation in this 
 
 * See the judgment of Sir William Scott (since Lord Stowell) 
 in the case of the French slave-trade ship le Louis (Dodson's 
 "Admiralty Reports," vol. ii. p. 238.)
 
 60 
 
 respect could not be carried farther than thus inci- 
 dentally to execute the municipal statutes of the bel- 
 ligerent state, by rejecting the claim of a subject of 
 that state, whose property should be taken in vio- 
 lating its revenue laws, or laws of trade, and brought 
 in for adjudication in the Admiralty Courts of his 
 own country. But a case occurred in 1810, in which 
 the doctrine was carried much farther, and extended 
 to property belonging to a neutral state, and taken 
 in the act of violating the municipal laws of the 
 owner's country. Such was the case of the Amadie, 
 an American vessel employed in transporting slaves 
 from the coast of Africa to a Spanish-American co- 
 lony. The vessel was captured, with the slaves on 
 board, by a British cruiser; and the vessel and cargo 
 condemned to the use of the captors in the Vice-Ad- 
 miralty Court at Tortola. On appeal to the Lords 
 of Appeal in Prize and Plantation Causes, the sen- 
 tence was affirmed. The judgment of the appellant 
 Court was delivered by Sir William Grant in the 
 following terms : — 
 
 "This ship must be considered as being employed, 
 at the time of capture, in carrying slaves from the 
 coast of Africa to a Spanish colony. We think that 
 this was evidently the original plan and purpose of 
 the voyage, notwithstanding the pretence set up to 
 veil the true intention. The claimant, however, 
 who is an American, complains of the capture, and 
 demands from us the restitution of property of which 
 he alleges that he has been unjustly dispossessed. 
 In all the former cases of this kind which have come 
 before this Court, the slave-trade was liable to con-
 
 61 
 
 siderations very different from those which belong 
 to it now. It had, at that time, been prohibited (so 
 far as respected carrying slaves to the colonies of 
 foreign nations) by America, but by our own laws 
 it was still allowed. It appeared to us, therefore, 
 difficult to consider the prohibitory law of America 
 in any other light than as one of those municipal 
 regulations of a foreign state of which this Court 
 could not take any cognizance. But by the altera- 
 tion which has since taken place, the question stands 
 on different grounds, and is open to the application 
 of very different principles. The slave-trade has 
 since been totally abolished by this country, and our 
 legislature has pronounced it to be contrary to the 
 principles of justice and humanity. Whatever we 
 might think as individuals before, we could not, sit- 
 ting as judges in a British court of justice, regard 
 the trade in that light while our own laws permitted 
 it. But we can now assert that this trade cannot, 
 abstractedly speaking, have a legitimate existence. 
 " When I say abstractedly speaking, I mean that 
 this country has no right to control any foreign le- 
 gislature that may think fit to dissent from this doc- 
 trine, and to permit to its own subjects the prosecu- 
 tion of this trade ; but we have a right to affirm that 
 prima facie the trade is illegal, and thus to throw 
 on claimants the burden of proof that in respect of 
 them, by the authority of their own laws, it is other- 
 wise. As the case now stands, we think we are en- 
 titled to say that a claimant can have no right, 
 upon principles of universal law, to claim the resti- 
 tution in a Prize Court of human beings carried as
 
 62 
 
 slaves. He must show some right that has been 
 violated by the capture, some property of which he 
 has been dispossessed to which he ought to be re- 
 stored. In, this case the laws of the claimant's 
 country allow of no property such as he claims. 
 There can, therefore, be no right to restitution. 
 The consequence is that the judgment must be af- 
 firmed."* 
 
 It may seem amazing that such a judicial mind 
 as that of Sir William Grant, at once acute and dis- 
 criminating, whose clear judgment was not likely 
 to be disturbed by passionate sympathy in the 
 cause of abolition should have arrived at such a 
 conclusion from such premises. "What a rapid 
 stride must public opinion have taken in England, 
 since the time when she extorted from Spain at the 
 peace of Utrecht the Assiento contract, securing 
 the monopoly of the slave-trade with the Spanish 
 colonies, *' as the whole price of the victories of 
 Ramillies and Blenheim;" when she "higgled at 
 Aix-la-Chapelle for four years longer of this exclu- 
 sive trade ;" when " in the treaty of Madrid, she 
 clung to the last remains of the Assiento contract;" 
 and, to come nearer the moment this anomalous 
 judgment was pronounced, when Lord Eldon, op- 
 posing the abolition as the leader of the court-party 
 in Parliament in 1807, entered into a review of the 
 measures adopted by England respecting the trade, 
 which, he contended, " Had been sanctioned bypar- 
 
 * Acton's " Admiralty Reports," vol. i. p. 240. — Fifth Report 
 of the Directors of the African Institution, pp. 11, 13.
 
 63 
 
 liaments in which sat the wisest lawyers, the most 
 learned divines, and the most excellent statesmen ;" 
 when Lord Hawksbury (afterwards Earl of Liver- 
 pool) moved that the words, " inconsistent with the 
 principles of justice and humanity," should be 
 struck out of the preamble to the Slave-trade Abo- 
 lition-Bill; when the Earl of Westmoreland de- 
 clared that, " Though he should see the Presby- 
 terian and the prelate, the Methodist and field- 
 preacher, the Jacobin and murderer, unite in favour 
 of the measure of abolition, he would raise his voice 
 against it in parliament !"* — what a rapid stride, we 
 repeat, must public opinion have taken in England 
 in the brief interval between these speeches in the 
 House of Lords and the delivery of the above judg-: 
 ment at the Cock-pit, for such a self-balanced mind 
 as that of Sir William Grant to be thrown from its 
 centre by the abstractions which form the basis of 
 his judgment, and by which the high Court in which 
 he presided was induced to usurp the illegitimate 
 power of executing the penal laws of another inde- 
 pendent country ! 
 
 In the case of the Fortuna, determined in 1811, 
 in the High Court of Admiralty, on appeal from 
 the inferior court. Lord Stowell, with evident 
 reluctance and against the manifest convictions 
 of his own superior mind, condemned another 
 American vessel with her cargo as destined to be 
 employed in the African slave-trade. In delivering 
 his judgment in this case, he stated, that an Ameri- 
 
 * Hansard's "Parliamentary Debates,'" vol. viii.
 
 64 
 
 can ship, quasi American, was entitled, upon proof, 
 to immediate restitution; but she might forfeit, 
 as other neutral ships might, that title, by various 
 acts of misconduct, by violations of belligerent 
 rights most clearly and universally. But though 
 the Prize-Court looked primarily to violations 
 of belligerent rights as grounds of confiscation in 
 vessels not actually belonging to the enemy, it had 
 extended itself a good deal beyond considerations of 
 that description only. It had been established by 
 recent decisions of the Supreme Court, that the 
 Court of Prize, though properly a court purely of 
 the law of nations, has a right to notice the muni- 
 cipal law of this country in the case of a British 
 vessel which, in the course of a prize-proceeding, 
 appears to have been trading in violation of that 
 law, and to reject a claim for her on that account. 
 That principle had been incorporated into the 
 prize-law of this country within the last twenty 
 years, and seemed now fully incorporated. A late 
 decision in the case of the Amadie seemed to have 
 gone the length of establishing a principle, that any 
 trade contrary to the general law of nations, although 
 not tending to, or accompanied with, any infrac- 
 tion of the law of that country whose tribunals 
 were called upon to consider it, might subject the 
 vessels employed in that trade to confiscation. The 
 Amadie was an American ship employed in carry- 
 ing on the slave-trade ; a trade which this country, 
 since its own abandonment of it, had deemed repug- 
 nant to the law of nations, to justice, and humanity ; 
 though without presuming so to consider and treat
 
 65 
 
 it where it occurs in the practice of the subjects 
 of a state which continued to tolerate and protect 
 it by its own municipal regulations : but it put 
 upon the parties the burden of showing that it 
 was so tolerated and protected ; and in failure of 
 producing such proof, proceeded to condemnation, 
 as it did in the case of that vessel. " How far that 
 judgment has been universally concurred in and 
 approved," continued Lord Stowell, " is not for me 
 to inquire. If there he those who disapprove ofit^ I 
 certainly am not at liberty to include myself in that 
 number, because the decisions of that Court bind au- 
 thoritatively the conscience of this; its decisions must 
 be conformed to, andits principles practically adopted. 
 The principle laid down in that case appears to be, 
 that the slave-trade carried on by a vessel belonging 
 to a subject of the United States is a trade which, 
 being unprotected by the domestic regulations of > 
 their legislature and government, subjects the ves- 
 sel engaffed in it to a sentence of condemnation. If 
 the ship should therefore turn out to be an American, 
 actually employed ; it matters not, in my opinion, 
 in what stage of the employment, whether in the 
 inception, or the prosecution, or the consummation 
 of it; the case of the Amadie will bind the conscience 
 of this Court to the effect of compelling it to pro- 
 nounce a sentence of confiscation."* 
 
 In a subsequent case, that of the Diana, Lord 
 Stowell limited the application of the doctrine in- 
 
 * Dodson's " Admiralty Reports," vol. i. p. 81. Fifth Report 
 of the Committee of the African Institution, p. 15. 
 9
 
 66 
 
 vented by Sir W. Grant to the special circumstances 
 whicli distinguished the case of the Amadie. The 
 Diana was a Swedish vessel, captured by a British 
 cruiser on the coast of Africa whilst actually en- 
 gaged in carrying slaves to the Swedish West India 
 possessions. The vessel and cargo was restored to 
 the Swedish owner, on the ground that Sweden 
 had not then prohibited the trade, by law or con- 
 vention, and still continued to tolerate it in practice. 
 It was stated by Lord Stowell, in delivering the 
 judgment of the High Court of Admiralty in this 
 case, that England had abolished the trade as un- 
 just and criminal; but she claimed no right of en- 
 forcing that prohibition against the subjects of those 
 states which had not adopted the same opinion; 
 and England did not mean to set herself up as the 
 legislator and ciistos morum for the whole world, 
 or presume to interfere with the commercial regu- 
 lations of other states. The principle of the case 
 of the Amadie was, that where the municipal law 
 of the country to which the parties belonged had 
 prohibited the trade, British tribunals would hold it 
 to be illegal, upon general principles of justice and 
 humanity ; but they would respect the property of 
 persons engaged in it under the sanction of the laws 
 of their own country.* 
 
 The above three cases arose during the continu- 
 ance of the war, and whilst the laws and treaties 
 prohibiting the slave-trade were incidentally exe- 
 
 ' Dodson's " Admiralty Reports," vol. i. p. 95.
 
 67 
 
 cuted through the exercise of the belhgerent right 
 of visitation and search. 
 
 In the case of the Diana, Lord Stowell had 
 sought to distinguish the circumstances of that ease 
 from those of the Amadie, so as to raise a distinc- 
 tion between the case of the su'tjects of a country 
 which had already prohibited the slave-trade from 
 that of those whose government still continued to 
 tolerate it. At last came the case of the French 
 vessel called the Louis, captured after the general 
 peace by a British cruiser, and condemned in the 
 inferior Court of Admiralty. Lord Stowell reversed 
 the sentence in 1817, discarding altogether the au- 
 thority of the Amadie as a precedent, both upon 
 general reasoning which w^ent to shake that case to 
 its very foundations, and upon the special ground, 
 that even admitting that the trade had been actually 
 prohibited by the municipal laws of France (which 
 was doubtful,) the right of visitation and search 
 (being an exclusively belligerent right,) could not 
 consistently with the law of nations be exercised in 
 time of peace to enforce that prohibition by the 
 British courts upon the property of French subjects. 
 In delivering the judgment of the High Court of 
 Admiralty in this case, Lord Stowell held that the 
 slave-trade, though unjust and condemned by the 
 statute-law of England was not piracy, nor was it 
 a crime by the universal law of nations. A court 
 of justice, in the administration of law, must look to 
 the legal standard of morality, — a standard which, 
 upon a question of this nature, must be found in
 
 68 
 
 the law of nations as fixed and evidenced by gene- 
 ral, ancient, and admitted practice, by treaties, and 
 by the general tenor of the laws, ordinances, and 
 formal transactions of civilized states; and looking 
 to these authorities, he found a difficulty in main- 
 taining that the transaction was legally criminal. 
 To make it piracy or a crime by the universal law 
 of nations, it must have been so considered and 
 treated in practice by all civilized states, or made so 
 by virtue of a general convention. 
 
 The slave-trade, on the contrary, had been carried 
 on by all nations, including Great Britain, until 
 a very recent period, and was still carried on by 
 Spain and Portugal, and not yet entirely prohibited 
 by France. It was not, therefore, a criminal 
 traffic by the consuetudinary law of nations ; and 
 every nation, independently of special compact, 
 retained a legal right to carry it on. No nation 
 could exercise the right of visitation and search upon 
 the common and unappropriated parts of tiie ocean 
 except upon the belligerent claim. No one nation 
 had a right to force its way to the liberation of 
 Africa by trampling on the independence of other 
 states ; or to procure an eminent good by means 
 that are unlawful ; or to press forward to a great 
 principle by breaking through other great princi- 
 ples that stand in the way. The right of visitation 
 and search on the high seas did not exist in time of 
 peace. If it belonged to one nation, it equally 
 belonged to all, and would lead to gigantic mischief 
 and universal war. Other nations had refused to 
 accede to the British proposal of a reciprocal right
 
 69 
 
 of search in the African seas, and it would require 
 an express convention to give the right of search in 
 time of peace. * 
 
 The leading principles of this judgment were 
 confirmed in 1820 by the Court of King's Bench, 
 in the case of Madrazo v. Willis, in which the 
 point of the illegality of the slave-trade under the 
 general law of nations came incidentally in question. 
 The Court held that the British statutes against the 
 slave-trade were applicable to British subjects only. 
 The British Parliament could not prevent the sub- 
 jects of other states from carrying on the trade out 
 of the limits of the British dominions. If a ship be 
 acting contrary to the general law of nations, she is 
 thereby subject to condemnation ; but it was im- 
 possible to say that the slave-trade is contrary to 
 the law of nations. It was, until lately, carried on 
 by all the nations of Europe ; and a practice so 
 sanctioned could only be rendered illegal, on the 
 principles of international law, by the consent of 
 all the powers. Many states had so consented, but 
 others had not ; and the adjudged cases had gone no 
 farther that to establish the rule, that ships belong- 
 ing to countries that had prohibited the trade were 
 liable to capture and condemnation, if found engaged 
 in it.f 
 
 A similar course of reasoning was adopted by the 
 Supreme Court of the United States in 1825, in the 
 case of Spanish and Portuguese vessels engaged in 
 the slave-trade, whilst that trade was still tolerated by 
 
 * Dodson's "Admiralty Reports," vol. ii. p. 210. 
 
 t Barnwell's and Alderson's" Reports," vol. iii. p. 35y.
 
 70 
 
 the laws of Spain and Portugal, captured by Ame- 
 rican cruisers, and brought in for adjudication in 
 the Admiralty Courts of the Union. In delivering 
 the judgment of the Supreme Court in one of these 
 cases, Mr. Chief-Justice Marshall stated that it 
 could hardly be denied that the slave-trade vs^as 
 contrary to the law of nature ; that every man had 
 a natural right to the fruits of his own labour was 
 generally admitted ; and that no other person could 
 rightly deprive him of those fruits, and appropriate 
 them against his will, seemed to be the necessary 
 result of this admission. But from the earliest 
 times war had existed, and war conferred rights in 
 which all had acquiesced. Among the most en- 
 lightened nations of antiquity, one of these rights 
 was, that the victor might enslave the vanquished. 
 That which was the usage of all nations could not 
 be pronounced repugnant to the law of nations, 
 which was certainly to be tried by the test of gene- 
 ral usage. That which had received the assent of 
 all must be the law of all. 
 
 Slavery, then, had its origin in force; but as 
 the world had agreed that it was a legitimate result 
 of force, the state of things which was thus pro- 
 duced by general consent could not be pronounced 
 unlawful. 
 
 Throughout Christendom this harsh rule had 
 been exploded, and war was no longer considered 
 as giving a right to enslave captures. But this tri- 
 umph had not been universal. The parties to the 
 modern law of nations do not propagate their prin- 
 ciples by force ; and Africa had not j^et adopted them.
 
 71 
 
 Throughout the whole extent of that immense con- 
 tinent, so far as we know its history, it is still the 
 law of nations that prisoners are slaves. The ques- 
 tion then was, could those who had renounced this 
 law be permitted to participate in its effects, by pur- 
 chasing the human beings who are its victims? 
 
 Whatever might be the answer of a moralist to 
 this question, a jurist must search for its legal solu- 
 tion in those principles which are sanctioned by the 
 usages, — the national acts and the general assent of 
 that portion of the world, of which he considers him- 
 self a part, and to whose law the appeal is made. 
 If we resort to this standard as the test of interna- 
 tional law, the question must be considered as de- 
 cided in favour of the legality of the trade. Both 
 Europe and America embarked in it ; and for nearly 
 tv\io centuries it was carried on without opposition 
 and without censure. A jurist could not say that a 
 practice thus supported was illegal, and that those 
 engaged in it might be punished, either personally 
 or by deprivation of property. 
 
 In this commerce, thus sanctioned by universal 
 consent, every nation had an equal right to engage. 
 No principle of general law was more universally 
 acknowledged than the perfect equality of nations. 
 Russia and Geneva have equal rights. It results 
 from this equality, that no one can rightfully im- 
 pose a rule on another. Each legislates for itself, 
 but its legislation can operate on itself alone. A 
 right, then, which was vested in all by the consent 
 of all, could be divested only by consent ; and this 
 trade, in which all had participated, must remain
 
 72 
 
 lawful to those who could not be induced to relin- 
 quish it. As no nation could prescribe a rule for 
 others, no one could make a law of nations ; and 
 this traffic remained lawful to those whose govern- 
 ment had not forbidden it. 
 
 If it was consistent with the laws of nations, it 
 could not in itself be piracy : it could be made so 
 only by statute ; and the obligation of the statute 
 could not transcend the legislative power of the state 
 which might enact it. 
 
 If the trade was neither repugnant to the law of 
 nations nor piratical, it was almost superfluous to 
 say in that Court that the right of bringing in for 
 adjudication in time of peace, even where the vessel 
 belonged to a nation which had prohibited the trade, 
 could not exist. The courts of justice of no country 
 executed the penal laws of another ; and the course 
 of policy of the American Government on the subject 
 of visitation and search would decide any case 
 against the captors in which that right had been ex- 
 ercised by an American cruiser, on the vessels of a 
 foreign nation not violating the municipal laws of 
 the United States. It followed, that a foreign vessel 
 engaged in the African slave-trade, captured on the 
 high seas in time of peace by an American cruiser, 
 and brought in for adjudication, would be restored 
 to the original owners.* 
 
 We thus perceive that the highest judicial autho- 
 rities in both countries concur in declaring that the 
 African slave-trade is not prohibited by the general 
 
 * Wheaton's " Reports," vol. x. p. 66. The Antelope.
 
 73 
 
 law bf nations ; and that so far as prohibited by the 
 municipal laws of particular states, or by special 
 compacts between particular states, such prohibition 
 can only be enforced by the tribunals of that coun- 
 try in which it has been enacted, or, in the other al- 
 ternative, of such countries as are parties to the 
 compact. That if the slave-trade be not unlawful 
 by the general law of nations, still less can it be con- 
 sidered as piracy under that law, to be punished as 
 such in a court of the law of nations. That the 
 right of visitation and search on the high seas by the 
 armed and commissioned vessels of one nation upon 
 the merchant-vessels of another, does not exist in 
 time of peace, unless by special compact, binding 
 only on those who have freely consented to become 
 parties to such compact. And that, consequently, 
 the right of visitation and search cannot be thus ex- 
 ercised in time of peace, for the purpose of bringing 
 in for adjudication the vessels of any nation suspected 
 of being engaged in the slave-trade, whether the 
 trade has been prohibited by the municipal laws of 
 that nation or not, unless it has expressly consented 
 to the exercise of the right for that purpose. 
 
 Such was the state of judicial opinion in England 
 respecting the legality of the slave-trade according 
 to the recognised principle of public law, when a 
 joint address of the two Houses of Parliament was 
 presented to the Prince Regent on the 9th of July, 
 1819, congratulating his Royal Highness upon the 
 success which had crowned the efforts of the British 
 Government for the suppression of the slave-trade ; 
 
 that guilty traffic having been declared by the con- 
 10
 
 74 
 
 current voice of all the great powers of Europe, as- 
 sembled ill Congress, to be repugnant to the princi- 
 ple of humanity and of universal morality. 
 
 That, consequently, on this declaration, all the 
 states v^^hose subjects were formerly concerned in 
 this criminal traffic had since prohibited it, the 
 greater part absolutely and entirely ; some, for a 
 time, partially, on that part of the coast of Africa 
 only which is to the north of the line : of the two 
 states (Spain and Portugal) which still tolerated the 
 traffic, one would soon cease to be thus distinguished ; 
 the period which Spain had fixed for the total abo- 
 lition of the trade being near at hand : one power 
 alone (Portugal) had hitherto forborne to specify 
 any period when the traffic should be absolutely 
 prohibited. 
 
 That the United States of America were honour- 
 ably distinguished as the first which pronounced the 
 condemnation of the guilty traffic; and that they had 
 since successively passed various laws for carrying 
 their prohibition into effect : 
 
 That, nevertheless, the two Houses of Parliament 
 could not but hear with feelings of deep regret, that, 
 notwithstanding the strong condemnation of the 
 crime by all the great powers of Europe and by the 
 United States of America, there was reason to fear 
 that the measures which had been hitherto adopted 
 for actually suppressing these crimes were not yet 
 adequate to their purpose : 
 
 That they never, however, could admit the per- 
 suasion that so great and generous a people as that 
 of France, which had condemned this guilty com-
 
 75 
 
 merce in the strongest terms, would be less earnest 
 than the British nation to wipe away so foul a blot 
 on the character of a Christian people : 
 
 That they, if possible, were still less willing to 
 admit such a supposition in the instance of the 
 United States; a people derived originally from the 
 same common stock with the British nation, and fa- 
 voured, like them, in a degree hitherto perhaps un- 
 equalled in the history of the world, with the enjoy- 
 ment of civil and religious liberty, and all their 
 attendant blessings : 
 
 " That the consciousness that the Government of 
 this country was originally instrumental in leading 
 the Americans into this criminal course, must natu- 
 rally prompt us to call on them the more importu- 
 nately to join us in endeavouring to put an entire 
 end to the evil of which it is productive." 
 
 The Address farther stated that the two Houses 
 of Parliament conceived that the establishment of 
 some concert and co-operation in the measures to 
 be taken by the different powers for the execution 
 of their common purpose, might, in various respects, 
 be of great practical utility ; and that under the im- 
 pression of this persuasion, several of the European 
 states had already entered into conventional arrange- 
 ments for seizing vessels engaged in the criminal 
 traffic, and for bringing to punishment those who 
 should still be guilty of these nefarious practices : 
 
 That they, therefore, supplicated his Royal 
 Highness to renew his beneficent endeavours, more 
 especially witli the Governments of France and of 
 the United States of America, for the effectual
 
 76 
 
 attainment of an object which all professed equally 
 to have in view ; and they could . not but indulge 
 the confident hope that their efforts might yet, ere 
 long, produce their desired effect, — might ensure 
 the practical enforcement of principles universally 
 acknowledged to be undeniably just and true, — 
 and might obtain for the long afflicted people of 
 Africa the actual termination of their wTongs and 
 miseries, — and might destroy for ever that fatal 
 barrier which, by obstructing the ordinary course 
 of civilization and social improvement, had so long 
 kept a large portion of the globe in darkness and 
 barbarism, and rendered its connexion with the 
 civilized and Christain nations of the earth a fruit- 
 ful source only of wretchedness and desolation.* 
 
 Sustained with the support given by this Parlia- 
 mentary Address, Lord Castlereagh once more re- 
 newed the efforts he had previously made to secure 
 the assent of the American Government to the ex- 
 ercise of the right of visitation and search in time 
 of peace as a means of more effectually suppressing 
 the slave-trade. 
 
 In consequence of his lordship's instructions, Sir 
 Stratford Canning, the British minister at Wash- 
 ington, presented to Mr. John Quincy Adams, 
 Secretary of State of the American Government, 
 a note, under date of 20th of December, 1820, 
 statins that notwithstandinor all that had been done 
 on both sides of the Atlantic for the suppression of 
 the African slave-trade, it was notorious that an 
 
 * Fourteenth Report of the African Institution, pp. 4-7.
 
 77 
 
 illicit commerce, attended with aggravating suffer- 
 ing to its unhappy victims, was still carried on ; 
 and that it was generally acknowledged that a com- 
 bined system of maritime police could alone afford 
 the means of putting it down with effect. 
 
 The note farther stated, that the concurrence of 
 principle in the condemnation and prohibition of 
 the slave-trade, which had so honourably distin- 
 guished the British Parliament and American Con- 
 gress, seemed naturally and unavoidably to lead to 
 a concert of measures between the two governments, 
 the moment such co-operation was recognised as 
 necessary for the accomplishment of their mutual 
 purpose. It could not be anticipated that either of 
 the parties, discouraged by such difficulties as are 
 inseparable from all human transactions of any 
 magnitude, w^ould be content to acquiesce in the 
 continuance of a practice so flagrantly immoral, 
 especially at the (then) present favourable period, 
 when the slave-trade was completely prohibited to 
 the north of the equator and countenanced by Por- 
 tugal alone to the south of that line. 
 
 The note concluded by stating, that Mr. Adams 
 was fully acquainted with the particular measures 
 recommended by His Majesty's ministers as best 
 calculated, in their opinion, to attain the object 
 which both parties had in view ; but he need not be 
 reminded that the British Government was too sin- 
 cere in the pursuit of that common object to press 
 the adoption of its own proposal, however satisfac- 
 tory in themselves, to the exclusion of any sugges- 
 tions equally conducive to the same end, and more
 
 78 
 
 agreeable to the institutions or prevailing opinions 
 of other nations. 
 
 In his reply to this note, Mr. Adams stated, that 
 the proposals made by the British Government to 
 the United States, inviting their accession to the ar- 
 rangements contained in the treaties relating to the 
 slave-trade with Spain, Portugal, and the Nether- 
 lands, to which Great Britain was a reciprocal con- 
 tracting party, had been again taken into conside- 
 ration by the President, with an anxious desire of 
 contributing to the final suppression of the trade to 
 the utmost extent of the powers within the compe- 
 tency of the Federal Government, and by means 
 compatible with its duties m respect to the rights of 
 its own citizens and the principles of its national in- 
 dependence. 
 
 The reply farther stated, that at an earlier period 
 of the communications between the two govern- 
 ments upon this subject, the President, in manifest- 
 ing his sensibility to the amicable spirit of confi- 
 dence with which the measures concerted between 
 Great Britain and some of her European allies had 
 been made known to the United States, and to the 
 candid offer of admitting them to a participation in 
 those measures, had instructed the American minis- 
 ter in London to represent the difficulties which 
 placed the President under the necessity of declining 
 the proposal. These difficulties resulted, as well 
 from certain principles of international larv of the 
 deepest and most painful interest to the United States, 
 as from limitations of authority prescribed by the 
 American people to the legislative and executive
 
 79 
 
 depositories of the national power. On this occa- 
 sion it had been represented, that a compact, giving 
 the power to the naval officers of one nation to search 
 the merchant-vessels of another for offenders and 
 offences against the latter, backed by a farther 
 power to seize and carry into a foreign port, and 
 there subject to the decision of a tribunal composed 
 of, at least, one-half foreigners, irresponsible to the 
 supreme corrective tribunal of the American Union, 
 and not amenable to the control of impeachment 
 for official misdemeanour, was an investment of 
 power over the persons, property, and reputation of 
 the citizens of that country, not only unwarranted 
 by any delegation of sovereign power to the national 
 government, but so adverse to the elementary prin- 
 ciples and indispensable securities interwoven in all 
 the political institutions of the United States, that 
 not even the most unqualified approbation of the 
 ends to which the proposed organization of authority 
 was adopted, nor the most sincere and earnest wish 
 to concur in every suitable expedient for their ac- 
 complishment, could reconcile it to those sentiments 
 and principles of which, in the estimation of the 
 American people and government, no consideration 
 whatever could justify the transgression. 
 
 Mr. Adams also referred, in his reply to the note 
 of Sir Stratford Canning, to several conferences 
 between them, in which the subject had been fully 
 and freely discussed, and in which the incompe- 
 tency of the power of the American Government to 
 become a party to the institution of tribunals or- 
 ganized like those stipulated in the treaties above
 
 80 
 
 noticed, and the incompatibility of such tribunals 
 with the constitutional rights guaranteed to every 
 citizen of the Union, had been shown by references 
 to the fundamental principles of the American 
 Government, by which the supreme, unlimited, 
 sovereign power is considered as inherent in the 
 whole body af the people, whilst its delegations are 
 limited and restricted by the terms of the instru- 
 ments sanctioned by them, under which the powers 
 of legislation, judgment, and execution, are adminis- 
 tered, and by special indications of those articles in 
 the constitution of the United States which ex- 
 pressly prohibit their constituted authorities from 
 erecting any judicial courts, by the forms of the 
 process belonging to which American citizens should 
 be called to answer for any penal offence without 
 the intervention of a grand jury to accuse and of a 
 jury of trial to decide upon the charge. 
 
 But, while regretting that the character of the 
 organized means of co-operation for the suppression 
 of the African slave-trade proposed by Great Britain 
 did not admit of the President's concurrence in the 
 adoption of them, he had been far from the disposi- 
 tion to reject or discountenance the general proposi- 
 tion of concerted co-operation with Great Britain to 
 the accomplishment of the common end — the sup- 
 pression of the slave-trade. For this purpose, armed 
 cruisers of the United States had been for some 
 time kept stationed on that coast which was the 
 scene of this odious traffic, — a measure which the 
 American Government intended to continue with- 
 out intermission. As there were armed British
 
 8i 
 
 vessels charged with the same duty, Mr. Adams 
 was directed by the President to propose that in- 
 structions, to be concerted between the two govern- 
 ments, with a view to mutual assistance, should be 
 given to the commanders of the vessels respectively 
 assigned to that service ; that they should be or- 
 dered, whenever convenient, to cruise in company 
 together, to communicate mutually all information 
 which might be useful to the execution of their re- 
 spective duties, and to give each other every assist- 
 ance compatible with their own service and adapted 
 to the end which was the common object of both 
 parties. 
 
 These measures, it was added, congenial to the 
 spirit which had so long and so steadily marked the 
 policy of the United States in the vindication of the 
 rights of humanity, would, it was hoped, prove ef- 
 fectual to the purposes for which their co-operation 
 was desired by the British Government, and to 
 which the American Union would continue to 
 direct its most strenuous and persevering exertions. 
 In a despatch from Lord Castlereagh to Sir Strat- 
 ford Canning, dated the 25th of March, 1821, the 
 former expressed his disappointment that the coun- 
 ter proposal of the American Government fell so far 
 short of the object which the British Government 
 had in view: but Sir Stratford Canninor was in- 
 structed to communicate to the American Govern- 
 ment the instructions under which the British naval 
 force stationed in the African seas was acting, and 
 to inform it that additional instructions would im- 
 mediately be sent to the British vessels engaged in 
 11
 
 82 
 
 that service to co-operate with such American ves- 
 sels as might be employed in those seas for the ex- 
 tinction of the traffic* 
 
 It appears, then, that the American Government 
 still adhered, in 1820-21, to their original objec- 
 tions to the concession of the right of visitation and 
 search as demanded by the British Government. 
 
 On the 29th of January, 1823, Sir Stratford 
 Canning once more addressed an official letter on 
 this subject to Mr. Adams, stating that the British. 
 Government still remained convinced that the only 
 effectual means of suppressing the traffic was to be 
 found in the proposed mutual concession of the 
 right of search. He, at the same time, invited the 
 communication on the part of the American Govern- 
 ment of some efficient counter proposal originating 
 with itself The letter also requested the American 
 cabinet to give instructions to its envoy at Paris to 
 concur with the British ambassador in a joint repre- 
 sentation to the French Government on the sub- 
 ject of the slave-trade, which still continued to be 
 carried on under the French flag. 
 
 On the 8th of March, 1823, a resolution passed 
 the House of Representatives, " That the President 
 of the United States be requested to enter upon, 
 and to prosecute, from time to time, such negotia- 
 tions with the several maritime powers of Europe 
 and America, as he may deem expedient, for the 
 effectual abolition of the African slave-trade and its 
 
 * Supplement to the Annual Report of the Directors of the 
 African Institution for the year 1821, pp. 151-157.
 
 83 
 
 ultimate denunciation as piracy, under the law of 
 nations, by the consent of the civilized world." 
 
 On the 31st March, 1823, Mr. Adams replied to 
 Sir S. Canning's letter, stating that the answer 
 had been delayed, not by any abatement of the in- 
 terest felt by the American Government for the 
 final suppression of the slave-trade, nor by any 
 hesitation as to persevering in its former refusal to 
 submit their vessels and citizens to the search of 
 foreign officers upon the high seas, but by an ex- 
 pectation that the proceedings in Congress would 
 indicate to the executive government views upon 
 which it might be enabled to substitute a proposal 
 more effectual for this purpose and less objectionable 
 than that to which the United States could not be 
 reconciled, namely, that of granting the right of 
 search. These proceedings had resulted in the 
 above resolution, which would doubtless have 
 obtained the sanction of the senate, had there 
 been time to collect the opinion of that branch of 
 the national legislation before the close of the ces- 
 sion. The President had, therefore, no hesitation 
 in acting upon the expressed and almost unanimous 
 sense of the House of Representatives, so far as to 
 declare the willingness of the American Union to 
 join with other nations in the common engagement 
 to pursue and punish those who shall continue to 
 practise this crime, so reprobated by the just and 
 humane of every country as enemies of the human 
 race, and to fix them, irrevocably, in the class and 
 under the denomination of pirates. 
 
 Mr. Adams also transmitted to Sir S. Canning a 
 copy of the act of Congress of the 15th May, 1820,
 
 84 
 
 by which any citizen of the United States, being of 
 the crew of any foreign ship engaged in the slave- 
 trade, or amj person whatever being of the crew of 
 any ship owned, in whole or in part, or navigated in 
 behalf of American citizens, participating in the 
 slave-trade, is declared to have incurred the penalties 
 of piracy, and made liable to atone for the crime with 
 his life. The legislature of a single nation could go 
 no farther to mark its abhorrence of this traffic, or 
 to deter the people subject to its laws from contami- 
 nation by the practices of others. 
 
 Mr. Adams farther stated that if, as represented 
 by Sir S. Canning, the French flag was more parti- 
 cularly employed to cover the illicit trade on the 
 coast of Africa, and to conceal the property and per- 
 sons of individuals bound to other allegiances, the 
 act of Congress above mentioned made every Ame- 
 rican citizen concerned in such covered trade liable, 
 when detected, to suffer an ignominious death. The 
 code of Great Britain herself had hitherto provided 
 no provision of equal severity in the prosecution of 
 her subjects, even under the shelter of foreign flags 
 and the covert of simulated papers and property. 
 
 Mr. Adams concluded by stating that he was in- 
 structed by the President to propose the adoption by 
 Great Britain of the principles of this act, and to 
 off"er a mutual stipulation to annex the penalties of 
 piracy to the offence of participating in the slave- 
 trade by the citizens or subjects of the two countries. 
 This proposal was made as a substitute for that of 
 conceding the mutual right of search, and of a trial 
 by mixed commissions, w^hich would be rendered 
 useless by it. Should it meet the approbation of the
 
 85 
 
 British Government, it might be separately urged 
 upon the adoption of France and the other European 
 powers in the manner most conducive to its ultimate 
 success. 
 
 This counter-proposal, which had been invited by 
 the intimation in Sir S. Canning's letter, calling for 
 a substitute to the British proposal of a mutual con- 
 cession of the right of search, was received by him 
 in the most ungracious manner. Instead of answer- 
 ing the American counter-proposal, he proceeded, 
 in his letter of the 8th of April, 1823, to discuss the 
 original British proposal for the concession of a re- 
 ciprocal right of search, and endeavoured to obviate 
 the various objections which had induced the Ame- 
 rican Government peremptorily to reject that propo- 
 sal. He at the same time intimated that the cap- 
 tured vessels, instead of being tried before a mixed 
 commission might be carried in for adjudication be- 
 fore the ordinary Courts of Admiralty of the captor's, 
 country, or before the similar courts of that country 
 to which the captured vessels belonged. This inti- 
 mation, he conceived, would remove the constitu- 
 tional objections previously urged by the American 
 cabinet against the proposed mixed commissions. 
 But the first part only of this alternative was dis- 
 tinctly proposed by the British negotiator, and was 
 considered by Mr. Adams in his reply as wholly in- 
 admissible. 
 
 In his reply, dated the 24th June, 1823, the 
 American Secretary of State observed, that his 
 offer was presented as a substitute for that of con- 
 ceding a mutual right of search with a trial by
 
 86 
 
 mixed commissions, to which the United States 
 could not be reconciled, and which would be ren- 
 dered useless by the proposed substitute. 
 
 Sir S. Canning, in his letter of the 8th April, had 
 intimated that the British Government would be 
 disposed to receive this offer only as an acknow- 
 ledgment that measures, more efficient than any 
 then generally in force, were indispensable for the 
 suppression of the slave-trade ; and although it had 
 never opposed the consideration of another plan 
 brought forward as equally effective, yet having 
 from the first reo^arded a mutual concession of the 
 right of search as the onhj true and practical cure 
 for the evil, their prevailing sentiment would be 
 that of regret at the unfavourable view still taken 
 of it by the American Government. Sir S. Canning's 
 letter therefore urged a reconsideration of it, and by 
 presenting important modifications, of the proposal 
 heretofore made, removed some of the objections 
 taken to it as insuperable, whilst it offered argu- 
 mentative answers to the others which had been 
 disclosed in the previous correspondence. 
 
 In the treaties concluded by Great Britain with 
 Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, for the sup- 
 pression of the slave-trade, and communicated to 
 the American Government with an invitation to 
 enter into similar engagements, three principles 
 were involved, to neither of which that government 
 felt itself at liberty to accede. 
 
 The 1st was the mutual concession of the right 
 of search and capture, in time of peace, over mer- 
 chant-vessels on the coast of Africa. The 2d was
 
 the exercise of that right even over vessels sailing 
 under convoy of the public officers of their own na- 
 tions; and the 3d was the trial of the captured 
 vessels by mixed commissions in colonial settle- 
 ments, under no subordination to the ordinary judi- 
 cial tribunals of the country to which the party 
 brouo^ht before them should belono^. 
 
 In Sir S. Canning's letter of the 8th of April, an 
 expectation was authorized that an arrangement for 
 the adjudication of the vessels detained might leave 
 them to be disposed of in the ordinary way, by the 
 sentence of an Admiralty Court in the captor's 
 country, or place them under the jurisdiction of a 
 similar court in the country to which they belonged ; 
 to the former alternative of which the British envoy 
 anticipated the ready assent of the United States, in 
 consequence of the aggravated nature of the crime 
 as acknowledged by their laws, which would thus 
 be " submitted to the jurisdiction of d. foreign Court 
 of Admiralty." But it was precisely because it 
 was foreign, that the objection was taken to the trial 
 by mixed commissions; and if it transcended the 
 constitutional authority of the United States' go- 
 vernment to subject the persons, property, and repu- 
 tations of their citizens to the decisions of a court 
 partly composed of their own countrymen, it might 
 seem needless to remark that the constitutional ob- 
 jection could not diminish, in proportion as its cause 
 should increase, or that the power competent to 
 make American citizens amenable to a court con- 
 sisting of one-half foreigners, should be adequate to
 
 88 
 
 place their liberty, their fortune, and their fame at 
 the disposal of tribunals entirely foreign. 
 
 Mr. Adams farther remarked that the sentence 
 of an Admiralty Court in the country of the captor 
 was not the ordiriary way by which the vessels of 
 one nation, taken on the high seas by the officers of 
 another, are tried in time of peace. There was in 
 the ordinary way no right whatever existing to take, 
 to search, or even to boaird them; and he took that 
 occasion to express the great satisfaction with which 
 the American Government had seen this principle 
 solemnly recognised by a recent decision of a British 
 Court of Admiralty.* Nor was the aggravated 
 nature of the crime for the trial of which a tribunal 
 may be instituted a cogent motive for assenting to 
 the principle of subjecting American citizens, their 
 rights and interests, to the decision of foreign courts ; 
 for although Great Britain, as Sir S. Canning re- 
 marked, might be willing to abandon those of her 
 subjects who defied the laws and tarnished the 
 honour of their country by participating in this traf- 
 fic, to the dispensation of justice by foreign hands, 
 the United States were bound to remember, that the 
 power which enabled a court to try the guilty, au- 
 thorized it also to pronounce upon the fate of the 
 innocent ; and that the very question of guilt or in- 
 nocence was that which the protecting care of their 
 constitution had reserved, for the citizens of the 
 
 * Alluding, doubtless, to the judgment of Lord Stowell in the 
 case of Le Louis.
 
 89 
 
 Union, to the exclusive decision of their own coun- 
 trymen. This principle had not been departed from 
 by the statute which had branded the slave-trader 
 with the name and doomed to the punishment of a 
 pirate. The distinction between piracy by the law 
 of nations and piracy by statute was well known and 
 understood in Great Britain; and whilst interna- 
 tional piracy subjected the transgressor guilty of it 
 to the jurisdiction of any and every country into 
 which he might be brought, or wherein he might 
 be taken, statute piracy formed a part of the muni- 
 cipal code of the country where it was enacted, but 
 could only be tried by its own courts. 
 
 There remained the suggestion, that the slave- 
 trader captured under the mutual concession of the 
 power to make the capture might be deUvered over 
 to the jurisdiction of his own country. This ar- 
 rangement would not be liable to the constitutional 
 objection which must ever apply to the jurisdiction 
 of the mixed commissions or of the Admiralty 
 Courts of the captors ; and if Sir S. Canning's let- 
 ter was to be understood as presenting it in the cha- 
 racter of an alternative to which his government was 
 disposed to accede, Mr. Adams was authorized to 
 say that the President considered it as sufficient to 
 remove the obstacle which had precluded the assent 
 of the United States to the former proposals of the 
 British Government, resulting from the character 
 and composition of the tribunals to which the ques- 
 tion of guilt or innocence was to be committed. 
 
 The objections to the right of search, as inci- 
 12
 
 90 
 
 dental to the right of detention and capture, were 
 also in a very considerable degree removed by the 
 introduction of the principle that neither of them 
 should be exercised, except under the responsibility 
 of the captor in costs and damages to the tribunals 
 of the captured party. This guard against the 
 abuse of a power so liable to abuse would be in- 
 dispensable ; but if the provisions necessary for 
 securing effectually its practical operation, should 
 reduce the right itself to a power merely nominal, 
 the stipulation of it in a treaty would serve rather 
 to mark the sacrifice of a great and precious prin- 
 ciple, than to attain the end for which it would be 
 given up. 
 
 In the objections heretofore disclosed to the pro- 
 posed concession of the mutual right of search, 
 the principal stress was laid upon the repugnance 
 which such a concession would meet in the public 
 feeling of the country, and of those to whom its in- 
 terests were intrusted in that department of its 
 government, the sanction of which was required 
 for the ratification of treaties. The irritating ten- 
 dency of the practice of search and the inequalities 
 of its probable operation were only slightly no- 
 ticed by Mr. Adams, and had been contested 
 in argument, or met by propositions of possible 
 palliatives, or remedies for anticipated abuses, in 
 Sir S. Canning's letter. But the source and founda- 
 tion of all these objections had been scarcely men- 
 tioned in their former correspondence. They con- 
 sisted in the very nature of the right of search at
 
 91 
 
 sea, which, as recognised or tolerated by the usage 
 'of nations, was a right exclusively of roar, never 
 exercised but by an outrage upon the rights of 
 peace. It was an act analogous to that of searching 
 the dwellinof-houses of individuals on land. The 
 vessel of the navigator v/as his dwelling-house ; 
 and, like that, in the sentiment of every people that 
 cherished the blessings of personal liberty and 
 security, ought to be a sanctuary inviolable to the 
 hand of power, unless upon the most unequivocal 
 public necessity, and under the most rigorous per- 
 sonal responsibility of the intruder. Search at sea, 
 as recognised by all maritime nations, was confined 
 to the single object of finding and taking contraband 
 of war. By the law of nature, when two nations 
 conflict together in war, a third, remaining neutral, 
 retained all its rights of peace and friendly inter- 
 course with both. Each belligerent, indeed, ac- 
 quired by war the right of preventing a third party 
 from administering to his enemy the direct and im- 
 mediate materials of war; and, as incidental to this 
 right, that of searching the merchant-vessels of the 
 neutral on the high seas to find them. Even thus 
 limited, it was an act of power which nothing but 
 necessity could justify, inasmuch as it could not be 
 exercised but by carrying the evils of war into the 
 abode of peace, and by visiting the innocent with 
 some of the penalties of guilt. Among modern, 
 maritime nations an usage had crept in, not founded 
 upon the law of nature, never universally admitted, 
 often successfully resisted, and against which all
 
 92 
 
 had occasionally borne testimony by renouncing it 
 in treaties, — of extending this practice of search and 
 seizure to all the property of the enemy in the ves- 
 sel of a friend. The practice was, in its origin, 
 evidently an abusive and wrongful extension of the 
 search for contraband ; effected by the belligerent, 
 because he was armed ; submitted to by the neutral, 
 because he was defenceless; and acquiesced in by 
 his sovereign, for the sake of preserving a remnant 
 of peace rather than become himself a party to the 
 war. Having thus occasionally been practised by 
 all as belligerents, and submitted to by all as neu- 
 trals, it had acquired the force of an usage, which, 
 at the occurrence of every war, the belligerent may 
 enforce or relinquish, and which the neutral may 
 suffer or resist, at their respective options. 
 
 Mr. Adams forbore to enlarge upon the farther 
 extension of this practice, by referring to injuries 
 which the United States experienced when neutral, 
 in a case of vital importance ; because, in digesting 
 a plan for the attainment of an object which both 
 nations had equally at heart, it was desirable to 
 avoid every topic which might excite painful sensa- 
 tions on either side. He had adverted to the inte- 
 rest in question from necessity, — it being one which 
 could not be lost sight of in the then present discus- 
 sion. 
 
 Mr. Adams farther observed, that such being the 
 view taken of the right of search, as recognised by 
 the law of nations, and exercised by belligerent pow- 
 ers, it was due to candour to state that his govern-
 
 93 
 
 ment had an insuperable objection to its extension by 
 treaty, in any manner whatever, lest it might lead 
 to consequences still more injurious to the United 
 States, and especially in the circumstances alluded 
 to. That the proposed extension would operate, in 
 time of peace, and derive its sanction from compact, 
 presented no inducements to its adoption. On the 
 contrary, they formed strong objections to it: every 
 extension of the right of search, on the principles of 
 that right, was disproved. If the freedom of the sea 
 was abridged by compact for any new purpose, the 
 example might lead to other changes. And if the 
 operation of the right of search were extended to a 
 time of peace as well as war, a new system would be 
 commenced for the dominion of the sea, which might 
 eventually, especially by the abuses to which it 
 might lead, confound all distinctions of time and of 
 circumstances, of peace and of war, and of rights 
 applicable to each state. 
 
 The United States had, on mature considerations, 
 thought it most advisable to consider the slave-trade 
 as piracy. They had thought that it might, with 
 great propriety, be placed in that class of offences ; 
 and that by placing it there, they would more effect- 
 ually accomplish the great object of suppressing 
 the traffic than by any other measure which they 
 could adopt. 
 
 To this measure none of the objections which 
 had been urged against the extension of the right 
 of search appeared to be applicable. Piracy being 
 an offence against the human race, had its well-
 
 94 
 
 known incidents of capture and punishment by 
 death by the tribunal of every country. By making 
 the slave-trade piratical, it is the nature of the crime 
 which draws after it the necessary consequence of 
 capture and punishment. The United States had 
 done this by an act of Congress, in relation to them- 
 selves. They had also evinced their willingness, 
 and expressed their desire, that the change should 
 become general by the consent of every other power, 
 by which it would be made the law of nations. Till 
 then, they were bound by the injunction of their 
 constitution to execute it, so far as respects the 
 punishment of their own citizens, by their own tri- 
 bunals. They considered themselves, however, at 
 liberty, until that consent was obtained, to co-ope- 
 rate, to a certain extent, with other powers, in order 
 to ensure a more complete effect to their respective 
 acts; they placing themselves severally on the same 
 ground by legislative provisions. 
 
 It was in this spirit, and for this purpose, that 
 Mr. Adams had made to the British envoy the pro- 
 position then under consideration. 
 
 By making the slave-trade piratical, and attach- 
 ing to it the punishment as well as the odium inci- 
 dent to that crime, it was believed that much had 
 been done by the United States towards suppressing 
 it in their vessels and by their citizens. If the 
 British Government w^ould unite in this policy, it 
 was not doubted that the happiest consequences 
 would result from it. The example of Great Bri- 
 tain, furnished in so decisive a manner, would not
 
 95 
 
 fail to attract the attention, and command the re- 
 spect, of all her European neighbours. It was the 
 opinion of the United States, that no measure short 
 of that proposed would accomplish the object sc 
 much desired ; and it was the earnest wish of the' 
 American Government that the Government of his 
 Britannic Majesty might co-operate in carrying, it 
 into effect. 
 
 In a despatch dated on the same day with the let- 
 ter we have just analyzed, and addressed to Mr. Rushy 
 the American minister in London, Mr. Adams re- 
 capitulates the incidents of the negotiation on this 
 subject between the two governments, in 1820-21,. 
 in which the American Government had perempto- 
 rily refused to concede the right .of search in the- 
 form in which it was then proposed. He stated that 
 the sentiments of the committee of the House of Re- 
 presentatives, to whom had been referred the subject 
 of the slave-trade, were different from those of the 
 executive government in respect to the right of 
 search ; but that upon the passage of the resolution 
 above recited, it was well ascertained that the senti- 
 ments of the House itself on that point coincided 
 with those of the executive department, as developed 
 in its previous correspondence with the British en- 
 voy ; since the House had explicitly rejected an 
 amendment which was moved to the resolution, and 
 which would have expressed an opinion of that body 
 favourable to the mutual concession of the right. 
 
 The despatch to Mr. Rush then proceeds to ob- 
 serve that the general subject was resumed a short
 
 96 
 
 time before the decease of the Marquess of London- 
 derrj by the British minister at Washington, Sir S. 
 Canning, who suggested that since the total disap- 
 pearance of the British and American flags from the 
 trade, as well as those of the nations which had con- 
 sented to confide the execution of their prohibitory 
 laws to the superintendence of British naval officers, 
 it continued to flourish under the flag of France ; that 
 her laws,though in words and appearance equally se- 
 vere m proscribing the traffic, were so remiss in the 
 essential point of execution, that their eff'ect was 
 rather to encourage than to suppress it; and the Ame- 
 rican Government was urged to join in friendly re- 
 presentations to the French Government by instruct- 
 ing the American envoy at Paris to concur with those 
 which the British Ambassador had been charged with 
 making, in order to ensure a more vigilant fulfilment 
 of the prohibitory laws. This invitation was de- 
 clined from an impression that such a concurrence 
 might give umbrage to the French Government, and 
 tend rather to irritation than to the accomplishment 
 of the object for which it was desired. Mr. Gallatin 
 was, nevertheless, instructed separately to bring the 
 subject to the notice of the French Government, and 
 did so by an official note, communicating copies of 
 the recent laws of the American Congress for the 
 suppression of the trade, and especially of the act 
 which subjected every citizen of the United States 
 who should be polluted with it to the penalties of 
 piracy. 
 
 Mr. Adams then refers to Sir. S. Canning's
 
 97 
 
 letter to him of the 29th of January, calling upon 
 the American Government either to accede to the 
 mutual right of search, emphatically pronounced in 
 his belief to be the o??/?/ effectual measure devised, 
 or which was likely to be devised, " for the accom- 
 plishment of the end, or to bring forward some 
 other scheme of concert," which the British envoy 
 again declared his readiness to examine with re- 
 spect and candour, as a substitute for that of the 
 British Cabinet. 
 
 However discouraging this call for an alternative 
 might be, thus coupled with so decisive a declara- 
 tion of belief that no effectual alternative had been, 
 or was likely to be, devised, an opportunity was 
 offered, in pursuance of the resolution of the House 
 of Representatives, for proposing a substitute, in the 
 belief of the American Government, more effectual 
 than the right of search could be, for the total and 
 final suppression of this nefarious trade, and less 
 liable either to objections of principle or to abuses 
 of practice. 
 
 This proposition was accordingly made in Mr. 
 Adams' letter of the 31st of March, the answer to 
 which, on the part of Sir. S. Canning, barely no- 
 ticed the proposition, to express an opinion that his 
 srovernment would see in it nothing- but an acknow- 
 lodgment of the necessity of farther and more 
 effectual measures ; and then proceeded to an ela- 
 borate review of all the objections which, in the 
 previous correspondence, had been taken by the 
 American Government to the British connected 
 13
 
 98 
 
 proposal of a mutual right of search and a trial by 
 mixed commissions. 
 
 These objections had been of two kinds : 1st, to 
 the mixed commissions, as inconsistent with the 
 American constitution ; and 2d, to the right of 
 search, as a dangerous precedent, liable to abuse and 
 odious to the feelings and recollections of their 
 country. 
 
 In Sir S. Canning's letter, the proposal of trial 
 by mixed commissions was formally withdrawn, 
 and an alternative presented as practicable, one 
 side of which only, and that the inadmissible side, 
 was distinctly offered, namely, that of trial by the 
 courts of the captors. 
 
 The other side of the alternative would, indeed, 
 obviate their constitutional objection, and might 
 furnish the means of removing the principal in- 
 herent objection to the concession of the right of 
 search — that by which the searching officer is un- 
 der no responsible control for that act. 
 
 But in their previous correspondence (continued 
 Mr. Adams,) their strong repugnance to the right 
 of search had been adverted to, merely as matter 
 of fact, without tracing it to its source, or referring 
 to its causes. The object of this forbearance had 
 been to avoid all unnecessary collision with feelings 
 and opinions which were not the same on the part 
 of Great Britain and upon theirs; Sir S. Canning's 
 letter, however, professedly reviewing all the pre- 
 vious correspondence for the purpose of removing 
 or avoiding the American objections, and contest-
 
 99 
 
 ing the analogy between the right of search, as it 
 had been found obnoxious to America and as then 
 proposed for her adoption by formal compact, Mr. 
 Adams had been under the absolute necessity of 
 pointing out the analogies which really existed be- 
 tween them, and of showing that as the right of 
 search, independent of the right of capture, and irre- 
 sponsible or responsible only to the tribunals of 
 the captor, it was, as proposed, essentially liable to 
 the same objections as when it had been exercised 
 as a belligerent right. Its encroaching character, 
 founded in its nature as an irresponsible exercise of 
 force, and exemplified in its extension from search 
 for contraband of war, to search for enemy's pro- 
 perty, and thence to search for men of the searcher's 
 own nation, was thus necessarily brought into view, 
 and connected with the exhibition of the evils inhe- 
 rent in the practice, with that of the abuses which 
 had been found inseparable from it. 
 
 The United States had declared the slave-trade, 
 so far as pursued by their citizens, piracy; and, as 
 such, made it punishable with death. The resolu- 
 tion of the House of Representatives recommended 
 negotiations in order to obtain the consent of the 
 civilized world to consider it as piracy under the 
 law of nations. Those who were guilty of this 
 offence against international law might be taken on 
 the high seas, and tried by the Courts of any nation. 
 The principle which the American Government 
 would wish to introduce into the system, by which 
 the slave-trade should be recognised as piracy un-
 
 100 
 
 der the law of nations, would be, that though seiza- 
 ble by the officers and authorities of every nation, 
 the offenders should be triable only by the tribunal 
 of the country of the slave-trading vessel. In com- 
 mitting to foreign officers the power, even in a case 
 of conventional piracy, of arresting, confining, and 
 deliverintj over for trial, a citizen of the United 
 States, they felt the necessity of guarding his rights 
 from all abuses, and from the application of any 
 laws of a country other than his own. 
 
 A draft of a convention was, therefore, enclosed 
 by Mr. Adams to Mr. Rush, which, if tlie British 
 Government should agree to treat upon the subject 
 on the basis of a legislative prohibition of the slave- 
 trade by both parties, the latter was authorized to 
 propose and conclude. This projet was not, how- 
 ever, offered to the exclusion of any other which 
 mi"-ht be proposed on the part of the British Go- 
 vernment, nor any of its articles to be insisted on as 
 a sine quel non, excepting that which made the 
 basis of the whole arrangement to consist in the ex- 
 istence of laws in each country, rendering liable 
 their respective citizens and subjects to the penal- 
 ties of piracy for the offence of slave-trading, with a 
 stipulation to use their influence with other states 
 to the end that the trade might be declared to be 
 piracy under the law of nations. It was only from 
 considering the crime in the character of piracy 
 that the United States could admit the visitation of 
 their merchant-vessels by foreign officers for any 
 purpose whatever; and, even in that case, only un-
 
 101 
 
 der the most effective responsibility of the officer 
 for the act of visitation itself and for every thing 
 done under it. 
 
 Mr. Rush was instructed, in case the sentiments 
 of the British Government were averse to the prin- 
 ciple of declaring the slave-trade piracy by a legisla- 
 tive act, not to propose or communicate the projet 
 of convention. He would understand its objects to 
 be two-fold ; to carry into effect the resolution of the 
 House of Representatives, and to meet the call so 
 earnestly urged by the British Government for a 
 substitute for its proposal of the mutual right of 
 search. The substitute, by declaring the offence 
 piracy, carried with it the right of search for the 
 pirates, as existing in the very nature of the crime. 
 But to the concession of the right of search, distinct 
 from that denunciation of the crime, the objections 
 of the American Government remained in all their 
 original force. 
 
 It was subjoined in this despatch that it had been 
 intimated that the proposition for recognising the 
 slave-trade as piracy under the law of nations had 
 been discussed at the Congress of Vienna, and that 
 the American cabinet was expecting the communi- 
 cation of the papers on this subject promised by 
 Lord Liverpool to be laid before Parliament. Al- 
 though the United States had been much solicited 
 to concur in the measures of Great Britain and her 
 allies for the suppression of the trade, they had 
 always been communicated to the American Go- 
 vernment as purposes consummated, to which the
 
 102 
 
 accession of the United States was desired. From 
 the general policy of avoiding to intermeddle with 
 European affairs, they had acquiesced in this course 
 of proceedings ; but in order to carry into effect the 
 resolution of the House of Representatives, and to 
 pursue future discussions with great Britain, it was 
 obviously proper that communications should be 
 made to the American cabinet of the progress of 
 European negotiations for accomplishing the com- 
 mon purpose, whilst it was still in deliberation. 
 If the United States were to co-operate in the result, 
 it was just that they should be consulted, at least 
 with regard to the means which they were invited 
 
 to adopt.* 
 
 It will thus be perceived that the American exe- 
 cutive government and legislature of 1823-24, al- 
 though sincerely desirous of co-operating with Great 
 Britain for the suppression of the slave-trade, conti- 
 nued to repel the proposition of a mutual concession 
 even of the limited right of search, as a means to 
 that end, so long as it was coupled with the conse- 
 quence of carrying in the captured vessel for adju- 
 dication before a tribunal of the captor's country, or 
 before a mixed commission composed of judges ap- 
 pointed jointly by both countries. To the former 
 they objected, as identical with the exercise of the 
 belligerent right of search in time of peace, attended 
 with all its known abuses, of which the American 
 people had already had sufficient experience ; to the 
 latter, as subjecting their citizens to be tried before 
 
 * Nile'.s " Weekly Register," vol. xxvi. pp. 347-353.
 
 103 
 
 tribunals partly foreign, and thus to be deprived of 
 those securities guaranteed by their happy constitu- 
 tion and laws. The American cabinet would not, 
 therefore, consent to negotiate upon any other basis 
 than that of the enactment of a law by the British 
 Parliament similar to the act of Congress of 1820, 
 by which the citizens and subjects of each country 
 respectively should be subjected to the penalties of 
 piracy for the offence of trading in African slaves, 
 vv^ith a mutual stipulation to use the respective in- 
 fluence of the two contracting parties with the other 
 maritime and civilized nations of the world, to the 
 end that the African slave-trade might be generally 
 recognised as piracy under the law of nations. 
 
 This proposal seems to be substantially the same 
 with that made by Great Britain at the Congress of 
 Verona, with the exception of two important dis- 
 tinctions in these respective plans. These are, — 
 1st, that in the British proposal the intended conces- 
 sion of the right of search does not appear to have 
 been indissolubly connected, as in the American 
 plan, with the introduction of a new public law, by 
 which the offence of trading in slaves should be de- 
 clared, piracy under the general law of nations, and 
 thus subjected to the common jurisdiction of all ma- 
 ritime states, as in the case of piracy by the pre-ex- 
 isting law of nations, ^d, That the manner of exer- 
 cising this jurisdiction was not clearly explained in 
 the British proposal, but was probably meant to be 
 referred to the ordinary admiralty jurisdiction of the 
 captor's country, or to a mixed commission composed
 
 104 . 
 
 of judges jointly chosen by both parties. Whilst the 
 American plan proposed the seizure of the offending 
 persons and property by the commissioned vessels 
 of war of either party for adjudication in the tribu- 
 nals of that country to which the captured persons 
 and property belonged. 
 
 Tiie negotiation which ensued in consequence of 
 the above instructions to Mr. Rush was finally con- 
 cluded by a convention signed by him with the 
 British plenipotentiaries, Mr. Canning and Mr. 
 Huskinson, on the 13th of March, 1824, on the basis 
 proposed by the American Government, of the sepa- 
 rate law^s of the two countries declaring the offence 
 of the slave-trade to be piracy when committed by 
 the citizens or subjects of either country respectively, 
 with a stipulation that the contracting parties should 
 use their influence respectively, with other maritime 
 and civilized powers, to the end that the African slave- 
 trade might be declared piracy^under the law of na- 
 tions. The convention provided for the mutual exer- 
 cise of the right of visitation and search,under a va- 
 riety of restrictions and regulations, by the commis- 
 sioned naval officers of each party, duly authorized, 
 under the instructions of their respective govern- 
 ments, to cruise on the coast of Africa, America, and 
 the West Indies, for the suppression of the slave-trade. 
 It farther declared that any vessel of either country 
 carrying on the illicit traffic in slaves, might be cap- 
 tured by the commissioned cruisers of the other, 
 and delivered over, together with the persons found 
 on board, for trial in some competent tribunal, of
 
 105 
 
 whichever of the two countries they should be found 
 on examination to belong to, except when the ves- 
 sel in question should be in the presence of a ship 
 of war of its own nation. 
 
 The convention thus concluded was submitted, 
 on the 30th of April, 1824, to the Senate of the 
 United States for their advice and consent to its 
 ratification, as required by the American constitu- 
 tion in all cases of treaties negotiated by the Presi- 
 dent with foreign powers. It encountered much 
 opposition in that body, and finally passed on the 
 22d of May by the constitutional majority of two- 
 thirds of all the senators present, with the following 
 important amendments : — 
 
 1st. The provision, extending the cruising ground 
 of the armed vessels commissioned against the slave- 
 trade to the coast of America was stricken out, so 
 that the limits within which the right of search 
 might be exercised were restricted to the coasts of 
 Africa and the West Indies. 
 
 2dly. A provision for the trial as pirates of in- 
 dividuals, citizens or subjects of either party found 
 on board a vessel sailing under the flag of a third 
 power, was also stricken out. 
 
 3dly. A new article was proposed, by which it 
 should be free to either of the contracting parties, at 
 any time, to renounce the Convention, giving six 
 months' notice beforehand. * 
 
 The British cabinet refused to accept the altera- 
 
 * Nile's " Weekly Register," vol. xxvi. p. 233. 
 14
 
 106 
 
 tions proposed by the American Senate to the Con- 
 vention, and objected especially to that amendment 
 by which the words "of America" were proposed 
 to be stricken out of the 2d article. In the official 
 letter of Mr. Secretary Canning to Mr. Rush, dated 
 the 27th of August, 1824, explanatory of this re- 
 fusal, it was stated that the right of visiting vessels 
 suspected of slave-trading, when extended alike to the 
 West Indies and the coast of America, implied an 
 equality of vigilance, and did not necessarily imply 
 the existence of grounds of suspicion on either side. 
 The removal of this right, as to the coast of Ame- 
 rica, and its continuance as to the West Indies, could 
 not but appear to imply the existence, on one side, 
 and not on the other, of a just ground, either for sus- 
 picion of misconduct, or apprehension of an abuse 
 of authority. 
 
 To such an inequality, leading to such an infe- 
 rence, His Majesty's Government could never advise 
 His Majesty to consent. It would have been re- 
 jected if proposed in the course of negotiation. It 
 Could still less be admitted as a new demand after 
 the conclusion of the treaty.* 
 
 In Mr. Secretary Adam's despatch to Mr. Rush, 
 dated the 29th May, 1824, explanatory of the amend- 
 ments proposed by the Senate to the Convention, it 
 is stated that the exception of the coast of America 
 from the seas, upon which the mutual power of cap- 
 turing vessels under the flag of either party might 
 
 * Nile's " Weekly Register," vol. xxvii, pp. 247, 248.
 
 107 
 
 be exercised, had reference, in the view of the Se- 
 nate to the coast of the United States. On no part 
 of that coast, unless within the Gulf of Mexico,* 
 was there any probability that slave-trading vessels 
 would ever be found ? The necessity for the exer- 
 cise of the authority to capture was, therefore, no 
 greater than it would be upon the coast of Eur ope. ■\ 
 And we may add to this remark of Mr. Adams, that 
 Great Britain is the last maritime power in the world 
 that would consent to the exercise of the right of 
 search, in peace or in war, upon those seas which 
 wash her shores, — those seas over which she has 
 ever^ asserted the supreme, absolute, and exclusive 
 dominion. Well might the American Senate in- 
 sist upon the exemption of the Atlantic coast of the 
 United States from the exercise of a right of search 
 hitherto unknown to the lav\^ of nations, when they 
 had already suffered so much from the abusive exer- 
 cise of the belligerent right of search within their 
 very bays and harbours, especially as it was notorious 
 that the slave-traders had ceased to frequent that 
 coast ever since the importation had been effectively 
 prohibited in 1808. 
 
 During the whole course of these negotiations 
 
 * And Mr. Adams might have added that the greater part of the 
 Gulf of Mexico would be included within the denomination of the 
 West Indies. Vessels of war cruising between the islands of 
 Cuba and the southern Cape of Florida on one side, and the penin- 
 sula of Yucatan on the other, would completely intercept slave- 
 trade in the gulf. 
 
 t Nile's " Weekly Register," vol. xxvii. p. 246.
 
 108 
 
 between the United States and Great Britain, from 
 1818 to 1824, there is not the slightest trace of a 
 pretention so much as intimated, much less avowed, 
 on the part of the latter, of a right of visitation and 
 search to be exercised on the high seas, in time of 
 peace, for any purpose whatever, independent of 
 special compact and the free concession of the power 
 on whose vessels the right is to be exerted. 
 
 We now come to the treaties concluded in 1831 
 and 1833, between France and Great Britain, for 
 the repression of the slave-trade, by which the right 
 of search was first conceded by the former power 
 for this purpose. 
 
 These conventions limit the exercise of the right 
 thus conceded, first, to the western coast of Africa, 
 from the Cape Verd to the distance of ten degrees 
 south of the equator, — that is to say, from the fif- 
 teenth degree of north latitude to the tenth degree 
 of south latitude, and to the thirteenth degree of 
 west longitude from the meridian of Paris. 
 
 Secondly, — all around the island of Madagascar, 
 within a zone of twenty leagues in breadth. 
 Thirdly, — at the same distance from the coasts of 
 the island of Cuba. Fourthly, — at the same dis- 
 tance from, the island of Porto Rico. Fifthly, — 
 at the same distance from the coast of Brazil ; with 
 the provision that the suspected vessels, descried 
 and chased by the cruisers within the zone of 
 twenty leagues, may be visited by them without 
 these limits, if having kept the suspected vessels 
 always in sight, they have not been able to reach
 
 109 
 
 them within that distance from the coast. The 
 vessel thus captured to be carried in for adjudica- 
 tion before the competent court of the country to 
 which they, belong, there to be tried according to 
 laws in force in that country.* 
 
 It is understood that soon after the conclusion of 
 the supplementary Convention of 1833, between 
 Great Britain and France, for the more effectual 
 suppression of the slave-trade, a fresh overture was 
 made by the British Government to that of the 
 United States, to accede to the principle of the two 
 treaties of 1831 and 1833, by yielding the right of 
 search on similar terms and conditions as therein 
 stipulated between France and England. We are 
 not aware that the papers relating to this overture, 
 which is said to have been made by Lord Palmer- 
 ston to the American Cabinet, during the adminis- 
 tration of General Jackson, have been published, 
 and we are therefore unable to say whether it ever 
 assumed the form of a serious negotiation between 
 the two governments. 
 
 We come now to a very remarkable incident in 
 the transactions relating to the suppression of the 
 slave-trade. We refer to the measure brought for- 
 ward in the British Parliament, in 1839, by the 
 late ministry, to coerce Portugal into a more active 
 participation in the accomplishment of this object. 
 This measure, which might well be called a bill of 
 pains and penalties against an independent state, 
 
 * Martens, nouvcau rccueil, loni. ix. p. 544.
 
 110 
 
 although professedly aimed only at that power, was 
 of a very sweeping and extraordinary character, as 
 will be explained by the following extract from 
 the debate in the House of Lords, on the 15th 
 August, 1839. 
 
 " Viscount Melbolirxe rose to move the second reading of the 
 Slave-trade Suppression Bill. The present state of the question 
 rendered it unnecessary to go at any length into the details, or 
 state the grounds upon which he hoped for their lordships' ap- 
 proval of that motion. Their lordships would perceive that the 
 provisions and principles of that bill were clearly and distinctly 
 stated in the preamble. It was to the effect, that persons who 
 might be employed for the suppression of the slave-trade should 
 be indemnified against actions which might be commenced against 
 them; that the Court of Admiralty should be empowered to adju- 
 dicate on matters arising from these instructions; and also, that Go- 
 vernment should be empowered to grant bounties, in cases of cap- 
 ture made under these directions of her Majesty. Among the 
 many nations, however, under whose flag that business was now 
 carried on, he was sorry to say the Portuguese nation stood 
 pre-eminent. Their lordships knew how the affair stood with 
 regard to that nation; and that, notwithstanding the treaty into 
 which she had entered on the subject, she took no pains to carry 
 out its provisions. He was not inclined to use any strong lan- 
 guage on this matter; but the last notice which had been presented 
 to the Portuguese Government by the British envoy. Lord 
 Howard de Walden, so fully contained all tlie charges which 
 might be made against that nation in this respect, that he would 
 only call the attention of the House to that document. The noble 
 Viscount then read the document in question, the substance of
 
 Ill 
 
 which was, an accusation on the part of the writer against Portu- 
 gal, for having, notwithstanding several treaties at various pe- 
 riods, still continued the slave-trade, and refused to co-operate 
 with her Britannic Majesty in its suppression. He (Lord Mel- 
 bourne) conceived it unnecessary to go at greater length into that 
 particular part of the case, and more particularly as, in an address 
 of their lordships to the Crown, they had come to the resolution 
 of expressing their regret, that Portugal had not co-operated with 
 Great Britain in suppressing the slave-trade. Her Majesty had 
 complied with the prayer of that address, and had accordingly 
 given instructions to her cruisers to take such measures as might 
 be necessary for the purpose alluded to, and he (Lord Melbourne) 
 now presented that bill for a second reading, which would enable 
 the recommendation of their lordships to be carried out. 
 
 " The Duke of Wellington opposed the bill on the same 
 grounds on which he had been hostile to the late measure intro- 
 duced on the subject. Some of the clauses, he said, it would 
 be impossible to carry out without a breach of all our engagements 
 on this subject with foreign powers. He proceeded to remark, 
 that there were some nations, and one great nation, in particular, 
 the United States, with whom this country had no treati^ for 
 putting down the slave-trade. Now, as to searching the vessels 
 of the United States for papers, if he might judge from the corre- 
 spondence of the Consul at Havanna, there was every probability, 
 not only that there Avould be no inclination on the part of the 
 United States to permit the detention of their vessels, and the ex- 
 amination of their papers, but that that power would decidedly 
 resist any such attempt on our part. (Hear, hear.) This was 
 another reason, in his opinion, why measures on this subject 
 should originate with Government, who knew what means there 
 were for carrying the purposes of the measures into execution,
 
 112 
 
 rather than with Parliament. But there was another point of view 
 on which to consider the question. The officers and persons com- 
 manding the vessels on this service, under the authority of the 
 Lord High Commissioners of the Admiralty, were to be indemni- 
 fied from all the consequences, but the state could not be indemni- 
 fied. (Hear, hear.) Now their lordships might rely upon it, 
 that for every vessel of the United States detained by our cruisers, 
 for however short a time, this country would be held responsible 
 for all the demurrage, and so on. The Noble Duke, after calling 
 on their lordships not to take upon themselves the responsibility 
 of this measure, moved that it be read a second time that day six 
 months. 
 
 " Lord Brougham must say, that the motion with which the 
 Noble and Illustrious Duke concluded his otherwise able and most 
 temperate speech, gave him great concern. He deemed this bill 
 to be of the greatest possible advantage, even if larger alterations 
 might be thought fit to be made than he had reason to believe 
 would be necessary, and he hoped their lordships would not re- 
 ject the bill in its present stage, but allow it to go to a second 
 reading, and have alterations which might be necessarily made in 
 committee. It could not, at the same time, be disguised, that we 
 were peculiarly situated as to the United States, because we 
 had not concluded any treaty with them conferring the right of 
 search. It should be borne in mind, that the United States, at the 
 very earliest period they were enabled to do so by the federal 
 constitution, had adopted the abolition of the slave-trade, and were 
 the very first to make it piracy for any one of their citizens to 
 carry it on. 
 
 "Lord Wynford felt with the noble Duke, that if this bill 
 were to pass, six months would not elapse without seeing this 
 country at war with every state in Europe whicli had ships, for it
 
 113 
 
 could not be carried into operation except by violating existing 
 treaties. He could not consent to the second reading of the bill, 
 nor did he see the advantage of allowing it to go into committee, 
 as he could not see any alteration which could be made in it, which 
 could at all meet the objections made by the Noble Duke. (Hear.) 
 
 " The Bishop of London said, it was with the most sincere 
 concern he felt himself called upon to vote against the amendment 
 proposed by the noble Duke. He had, ever since. he was able to 
 think upon this subject, been of opinion, that this nation ivas espe- 
 cially appointed by Divine Providence, to undertake the task of 
 putting an end to the slave-trade, and that her position amongst 
 the maritime nations of the earth, ivhich had given her the power, 
 had at the same time imposed the duty of abolishing this unsanc- 
 tified traffic. 
 
 " The Lord Chancellor felt perfectly satisfied that their lord- 
 ships would all concur in forwarding this measure, but for a mis- 
 take into which they appeared to have been led. Noble lords 
 seemed to think, that, by the enactments of this bill, French ships 
 were to be searched, contrary to existing treaties. If that were 
 the case their lordships would undoubtedly be warranted in op- 
 posing it, but these were not the enactments. The object of the 
 bill was to direct where such search was to be made, and to 
 exempt officers acting under the direction of her Majesty from 
 being subject to civil prosecutions in this country for acting under 
 those orders. Certain orders had been issued by her Majesty 
 with respect to vessels engaged in the slave-trade ; and was it 
 to be supposed that the officers employed in the suppression of 
 this trade should carry out these orders at their own risk ? These 
 orders were issued in consequence of an address presented from 
 their lordships to her Majesty ; these orders were in accordance 
 with that address, and their lordship.s were only called upon by 
 
 15
 
 114 
 
 this bill to fulfil the engagement entered into by their address, and 
 the answer to it, and to indemnify the officers who acted under 
 them. 
 
 " Lord Ellenborough said, that if orders had been issued, 
 those orders should be communicated to their lordships before 
 they were called upon to afford indemnity to those who were to 
 act upon them. 
 
 " Lord Melbourne said, that such a course of communicating 
 the orders of her Majesty to the House, was unprecedented. 
 
 " Lord Ellenborough thought, that in order to know what 
 measures would be necessary, it was requisite that their lordships 
 should be made aware of the nature of the orders which had been 
 issued. 
 
 Lord Minto said, that of all the astounding doctrines he had 
 ever heard, was that which called upon her Majesty's ministers to 
 explain the terms of the instructions which had been sent out to 
 her Majesty's cruisers (hear, hear, from the ministerial benches;) 
 such a demand as this had never before been made, and he could 
 not see how their lordships should now require to be put in pos- 
 session of instructions which were given, as the noble Duke him- 
 self had admitted they should be given, on the sole responsibility of 
 the Government. There was nothing, he contended, in the pre- 
 sent bill, calculated in the slightest degree to excite the jealousy 
 of the government of the United States, which was as anxious as 
 we were to put an end to the slave-trade ; nor did the bill warrant 
 the commission of any act which was not as fully warranted Avith- 
 out it. The real question was, whether or not their lordships 
 would co-opsrate in carrying into effect the address to which they 
 had already ageeed ? 
 
 " Lord Denman, and Lord Colville, supported the bill, which 
 was approved by Lord Wicklow.
 
 115 
 
 " Their lordships then divided, when. ' ue members were — 
 Contents . . . - . . 39 
 Non-contents ... 28 
 
 Majority lor bill . . 11 
 •• The bill was accordingly read a second time."* 
 
 It is well known that this bill was subsequently 
 dropped by the Government in consequence of the 
 insuperable difficulties it encountered in its passage. 
 This attempt to enforce the abolition of the slave- 
 trade, against other independent states, by a British 
 Act of Parliament, must appear the more extraor- 
 dinary, as the complete exemption of the merchant 
 vessels of one nation from every species and purpose 
 of search by the armed and commissioned cruisers 
 of another on the high seas, in time of peace, inde- 
 pendent of special compact, had never been drawn 
 in question in the various negotiations on the subject 
 of the slave-trade between Great Britain and other 
 maritime powers, the United States included, from 
 the peace of Paris, 1814, to the signature of the 
 treaty of 1833, with France. Every line of each 
 document, and every word of each conference, im- 
 plies, in the strongest manner, that no such notion 
 had ever entered the minds of any one of the dis- 
 tinguished sovereigns, statesmen, and civilians, who 
 had bestowed their attention on this important 
 matter. 
 
 Not only so, but it is directly at war with an 
 
 '• London " Times," August 16th, 1830,
 
 116 
 
 official communication made by Lord Palmerston 
 to the government of the Republic of Hayti, under 
 date of the 27th of January, 1840, a few months 
 after the Portuguese slave-trade suppression bill 
 was brought into the House of Commons by his 
 lordship. In this communication, which is quoted 
 by Mr. Stevenson, in his note to Lord Palmerston, 
 of the 27th of February, 1841, the latter refers to a 
 law passed in 1839, by the Haytian Government, 
 providing that any vessel, whether Haytian or other- 
 wise, found in the act of slave-trading, should be 
 seized and brought into a port of the Republic for 
 adjudication. The communication states, that — 
 
 "Her Majesty's Government Avishes to draw the attention of 
 the Haytian Government to a matter of form in this law, which 
 may possibly give rise to embarrassments. The law enacts, that 
 all vessels, whether Haytian or foreign, which may be found in 
 the act of slave-trading, shall be seized and brought into a Hay- 
 tian port. Now, Hayti has undoubtedly a full right to make such 
 an enactment about her own citizens and ships, but her Majesty's 
 Government apprehend that Hayti has no right to legislate for the 
 ships and the subjects or citizens of other states. That in time of 
 peace, no ships belonging to one state have a right to search and 
 detain ships sailing under the flag of, and belonging to another state, 
 without the permission of such state, which permission is generally 
 signified by treaty ; and if Haytian cruisers M'ere to stop, search, 
 and detain merchant vessels sailing under the flag of, and be- 
 longing to another country, even thougli such vessels were en- 
 gaged in the slave-trade, the state to which such vessels belonged 
 would have just grounds for demanding satisfaction and repara-
 
 117 
 
 - tion from Hayti, unless such state had previously given to Hayti, 
 by treaty, the right of search and detention." 
 
 The first time we hear of such a pretension, as 
 that repelled by the British Government in the above 
 communication, being brought forward by that Go- 
 vernment in a diplomatic form, is in the correspon- 
 dence between Mr. Stevenson, the American Minis- 
 ter in London, and the late and present British 
 Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, the Lords 
 Palmerston and Aberdeen. 
 
 As the. documents containing this correspondence 
 are before the public in an accessible form, having 
 appeared in almost all the public journals of both 
 Europe and America, we deem it superfluous to sub- 
 ject the papers to that full and minute analysis which 
 we have thought necessary in respect to the previous 
 communications between the two Governments on 
 the same subject. We shall therefore endeavour to 
 collect, in a summary form, from the entire corres- 
 pondence, the real nature and import of the British 
 pretension. In doing this, we think it but fair to- 
 wards the British Government to bestow more par- 
 ticular attention on the note transmitted from the 
 Foreign Office to the American Minister in London, 
 since the late change of ministry ; not because we 
 do not, privately speaking, attach an equal impor- 
 tance to documents written and signed by Lord 
 Palmerston, as to papers proceeding from under the 
 hand of his noble successor in office. All that we 
 mean to say, is, that as our country has to deal in
 
 118 
 
 this momentous matter with the present British Go- 
 vernment, it is more important for us to determine 
 what are its real views and intentions in respect to 
 the question, so far as they can be collected from its 
 official language, than to make the subject of com- 
 mentary and criticism expressions which we fain 
 would hope were hastily and incautiously used, in 
 conference or in correspondence, by the eminent 
 statesmen who lately filled the office of Secretary of 
 State for Foreign Affairs. 
 
 The several cases of American vessels seized by 
 British cruisers in the African seas present exam- 
 ples, but too flagrant, of the abuses to which the ex- 
 ercise of such a right as that claimed by Great Bri- 
 tain on this occasion may be liable. The proceed- 
 ings of the British cruisers on the coast of Africa, in 
 one of these cases in particular (that of the Mary,) is 
 justly described by Mr. Stevenson, in his correspon- 
 dence with Lord Palmerston, "as wanting nothing 
 to give them the character of a most flagrant and 
 daring outrage, and very little, if any thing, to sink 
 them into an act of open and direct piracy." In- 
 deed, this attempt to exercise the rights of war in 
 time of peace must not only be attended with all the 
 evils consequent upon the exercise of the right of 
 search for enemy's propert}'- and contraband of war; 
 but as Lord Stowell has so justly observed, has an 
 inevitable tendency to lead to " gigantic mischief 
 and universal war," by provoking forcible resistance 
 on the part of the navigator, whose commerce is thus 
 interrupted by the uncontrolled violence of foreign
 
 119 
 
 cruisers. - The abuse of a right, such as the bellige- 
 rent riffht of visitation and search, which all nations 
 have occasionally exercised in turn, and none have 
 at any time denied (at least so far as respects con- 
 traband and blockade) to be authorized by the cus- 
 tomanj, if not by the natural law of nations, may 
 not be attended with the same fatal consequences 
 as are to be apprehended from the exercise of the 
 right now claimed. The exercise of the belligerent 
 right of search may be effectually controlled by the 
 Courts of Admiralty of the belligerent state, pro- 
 ceeding according to their established rules in de- 
 creeing costs and damages against the captor, in 
 cases of seizure, without such reasonable grounds 
 of suspicion as amount to probable cause. A forci- 
 ble resistance to the exercise of this right by the 
 belligerent cruiser, on the part of the neutral navi- 
 gator, may be regarded as an unlawful act of vio- 
 lence, and punished in extreme cases even by the 
 confiscation of his property. But where is the ma- 
 ritime code which instructs us in the nature of the 
 securities provided against the abuse of the pre- 
 tended right now, for the first time, asserted in the 
 face of the world? In what court, and by what 
 law, is the suspected vessel to be tried ? If the 
 seizure were made in time of war, the adjudi- 
 cation must necessarily take place, according to 
 the well-known law and usage of nations, in the 
 prize-court of the country of the captor, who is re- 
 sponsible to his own government, whose commis- 
 sion he bears for his acts under that commission;
 
 120 
 
 and that government again is responsible over to 
 the neutral state, whose subjects may complain of 
 the injury by them sustained. If the seizure be 
 made of a foreign vessel in time of peace or of 
 war, under the municipal laws of the captor's coun- 
 try, prohibiting the slave-trade, then it can only 
 take place within the territorial jurisdiction of that 
 state ; and a seizure upon the high seas, or within 
 the territorial jurisdiction of a third power, would 
 be so plainly illegal, that we may lay it out of the 
 question. The same thing may be affirmed of an 
 attempt to seize for a breach of the municipal laws 
 of the country to which the captured vessel belongs. 
 If, again, the seizure be made of a British vessel, 
 suspected to have usurped the flag and pass of a 
 foreign state, then the validity of the seizure, and 
 the question of jurisdiction itself must be made to 
 depend upon the event of the trial. If, on the other 
 hand, the seizure be made under the existing treaties 
 between Great Britian, the Netherlands, Spain, &c., 
 the trial must be had in the mixed-commission- 
 court, created by those treaties — a stipulation, to the 
 like of which the American Government has con- 
 stantly refused its assent. If it be made under the 
 treaties of 1831 and 1833, between Great Britain 
 and France, or under the more recent treaty be- 
 tween the five great European powers, signed at 
 London, on the 20th December last, the vessel 
 seized must be delivered over for trial to the compe- 
 tent tribunal of the nation to which she is suspected 
 to belong. But how can such tribunal acquire
 
 jurisdiction to determine the national character of 
 the vessels of a third power, an absolute stranger to 
 the compact under which the jurisdiction is to be 
 exercised. 
 
 All this is said upon the supposition that the visita- 
 tion is followed by search, and the search by seizure, 
 and the seizure by carrying in for adjudication. If 
 the visitation is not accompanied by search, it is an 
 idle ceremony, and a wanton interruption of the 
 navigator in the prosecution of his voyage. It is 
 by search only, by examining the ship's papers, 
 construction, and cargo, by interrogating her offi- 
 cers and crew, that the boarding officer can ascer- 
 tain whether, in his judgment, she is employed in 
 the slave-trade. And it is only by seizing and car- 
 rying in for adjudication, that it can be lawfully 
 determined by some competent authority whether 
 his suspicions are well or ill-founded. We assert, 
 therefore, that it affi)rds a violent presumption 
 against the existence of such a right, that its exer- 
 cise may draw after it consequences far more fatal 
 than those attending the ordinary belligerent right 
 of search, which may always be, and sometimes 
 actually is, restrained by known rules of practice, 
 which make a part of the general law of nations as 
 founded on usage. 
 
 On examining the letter of Lord Aberdeen to 
 Mr. Stevenson of the 13th October, 1841, we con- 
 fess ourselves unable to collect from it the real na- 
 ture of the distinction alleged to exist between the 
 right claimed by the British Government and the 
 IG
 
 122 
 
 ordinary right of visitation and search. If his lord- 
 ship has failed in expressing with sufficient clear- 
 ness and precision the conceptions of his own mind, 
 it is most certainly not for want of the requisite 
 talents as a writer, — since his letter is written with 
 the greatest terseness and elegance, — but ought 
 rather to be attributed to the embarrassment occa- 
 sioned by the intrinsic difficulties of a bad cause 
 left him as an official legacy by his predecessor, 
 and which the joint abilities of both might well 
 prove insufficient to maintain. Be this as it may, 
 Lord Aberdeen expressly asserts that he "renounces 
 all pretension on the part of the British Govern- 
 ment to visit and search American vessels in time 
 of peace. Nor is it as American that such vessels 
 are ever visited. 
 
 An attempt appears here to be made to distin- 
 guish between a right to visit and a right to search. 
 Now we have no hesitation in affirming that this 
 distinction has no foundation whatever in the mari- 
 time law of nations, and the usage of the Admiralty 
 courts of any country. The " right of visitation 
 and search'' is the appropriate technical term 
 always used by British civilians to express the belli- 
 gerent rio^ht — a term which Iiels a known sense and 
 value, and is the exact equivalent of the term droit 
 de visite used by the continental jurists. We re- 
 peat, that if the visitation is not accompanied by 
 search, it is an empty mockery, and a wanton in- 
 terruption of the navigator's voyage. And in con- 
 firmation of this assertion, we may observe that in
 
 123 
 
 all the cases brought to the consideration of the 
 British Government, by Mr. Stevenson, in pursu- 
 ance of the instructions of the American Govern- 
 ment, the visitation vv^as accompanied w^ith the most 
 rigorous search of persons and papers, of vessel 
 and cargo, followed, in some instances, by a pro- 
 tracted detention, and in others by a carrying into 
 port for adjudication. We have here, then, di prac- 
 tical commentary upon the text of these official 
 documents, w^hich demonstrates that the right 
 claimed is that of visitation and search. We may 
 also observe, that the same remark, made by Mr. 
 Adams, as to the concession of the right by compact, 
 would apply to a submission to its exercise without 
 compact; that is to say, that if the visitation be not 
 carried out by search, it " would reduce the right 
 itself to a power merely nominal," the submission 
 to which " would serve rather to mark the sacrifice 
 of a great and precious principle, than to attain the 
 end for which it would be given up."* 
 
 But Lord Aberdeen goes on to observe in the 
 above-quoted passage of his note to Mr. Stevenson : 
 " Nor is it, as America?!, that such vessels are ever 
 visited." 
 
 In answer to this suggestion, we would remark, 
 that neither is the neutral vessel visited, in time of 
 war, as neutral; but she is even visited, and cap- 
 tured, and detained, and carried in for adjudication, 
 as being suspected to be an enemy, either literally 
 
 ^ Mr. Secretary Adams' Letter to Sir S. Canning, June 24, 1823.
 
 124 
 
 such, or as having forfeited her neutral character 
 by violating her neutral duties. Hence the formula 
 of a sentence of condemnation in the Prize Court 
 always declares the ship or goods condemned to be 
 enemy' s property ; and that, in all cases, whether the 
 property really belongs to the enemy, or is assimi- 
 lated to that of an enemy by the offence of carrying 
 contraband, by breach of blockade, or other unneu- 
 tral conduct, which is visited by the Prize Court 
 with the penalty of confiscation. It is therefore 
 very little satisfaction to the master or proprietor of 
 an American vessel to be told that he is not visited 
 as an American, if the visitation be actually followed 
 by the most rigorous search, by protracted deten- 
 tion, and by sending into port for trial ; by all which 
 his voyage may be broken up, his cargo may perish, 
 and his crew fall victims to a pestilential climate. 
 We are not now arguing from the abuse against 
 the lawful use of an incontestable and well-defined 
 right ; although it appears from the documents be- 
 fore us that these supposed consequences are by no 
 means imaginary. We shall, of course, be under- 
 stood as only meaning to insist upon the considera- 
 tion that it is perfectly indifferent to the American 
 merchant and navigator, whether his voyage is in- 
 terrupted because he is an American, and suspected 
 of violating the laws of his own country, or because 
 he is suspected of not being a bona fide American, 
 and of violating the laws and treaties of other 
 countries under a false garb. Supposing him to be 
 engaged in an innocent comme-rce, all this is per-
 
 125 
 
 fectly indifferent to him ; and even supposing him 
 to be engaged in a trade prohibited by the laws of 
 his own country, he has, as we maintain, a perfect 
 right to be exempt upon the high seas in time of 
 peace, from visitation and search, and seizure and 
 detention for trial, by foreign officers and foreign 
 courts of justice. In order to establish the contrary 
 doctrine, it will be necessary to show in support of 
 it sore treaty to which his own country is a con- 
 tracting party, or some public law universally recog- 
 nised as forming a part of the general international 
 code. But no such treaty, and no such law, has, or 
 can be shown to exist. 
 
 Lord Aberdeen subjoins to this assurance, that 
 American vessels are not visited, in time of peace, 
 as American^ the startling assertion that "it has been 
 the invariable practice of the British navy," and, as 
 his lordship believes, " of all the navies in the world, 
 to ascertain hy visit the real nationality of merchant- 
 vessels on the high seas, if there be good reason to 
 apprehend their illegal character." 
 
 We might ask in vain for the evidence of the 
 existence, in point of fact, of this universal and in- 
 variable practice ; but the necessity for this inquiry 
 will be superseded, by showing that it has no sanc- 
 tion in law. And for this purpose, a reference to 
 the so-often quoted judgment of Lord Stov/ell, in 
 the case of the Louis, will be amply sufficient. In 
 that judgment, that learned civilian unequivocally 
 asserts, " that no authority can be found, which 
 gives any right of visitation or iiitemijdion over
 
 126 
 
 the vessels and navigation of otlier States, on the 
 high seas, except what the right of war gives to 
 belligerents against neutrals." The assertion of 
 Lord Stowell, that no such authority can be found, 
 must be considered as conclusive against its exist- 
 ence. 
 
 But let us examine a little more closely the asser- 
 tion of Lord Aberdeen. He does not state what 
 is to be the consequence of the visitation, supposing 
 that the suspicions excited, by whatever cause, are 
 confirmed in the opinion of the boarding-officer, by 
 the examination which may ensue. Visitation is 
 but means to an end, and unless accompanied by 
 some examination of the papers, the crew, the ves- 
 sel, and the cargo, it would be (as before remarked) 
 a mere idle ceremony, and wanton interruption of 
 the navigator in the prosecution of his voyage, 
 attended with greater probable injury to him, than 
 possible advantage to the interests of maritime police. 
 Nor is it stated what is the precise nature of the 
 " illegal character," the suspicion of which is here 
 assumed, as justifying the "invariable practice of 
 all the navies in the world, to ascertain by visit the 
 real nationality of merchant-vessels met with on the 
 high seas." Is it, we would ask, of such an illegal 
 character as may be manifested by acts prohibited 
 by the laws and treaties of the country to which 
 the vessel belongs, or by the laws and treaties of the 
 country to which the armed cruiser belongs, or 
 finally by the general law of nations ? To each of 
 these suppositions very distinct considerations be-
 
 127 
 
 long ; but we will confine our observations to the 
 last — that is to say, to the supposition that the ves- 
 sel has been guilty of some offence against the law 
 of nations, such as piracy, for example, by which, 
 of course, we mean international piracy, and not 
 merely that which is declared to be such by the 
 municipal statutes of a particular country. 
 
 On this part of the subject we have fortunately 
 the aid of the highest judicial authority, to confirm 
 the conclusions of our own minds as to the legal 
 principles which ought to be applied to it, in the 
 judgment of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, in the* case of the Marianna Floj^a, a Por- 
 tuguese armed merchant-vessel, bound on a voyage 
 from Brazil to Lisbon, and captured in 1821, by a 
 gallant officer of the American navy, then employed 
 in cruising with a public ship-of-war of the United 
 States, under the President's instructions, for slave- 
 traders and pirates. The capture was made, after 
 an accidental combat between the two vessels, un- 
 der mutual misapprehension, each supposing the 
 other to be a pirate. The Portuguese vessel and 
 cargo, being sent into an American port for trial, 
 under an act of Congress passed in 1819, as having 
 been guilty of a piratical aggression against the 
 American cruiser, were restored to the claimants by 
 the consent of the captors. The question as to 
 costs and damages, was brought before the Supreme 
 Federal Court in 1826, which enlightened tribunal 
 determined, that had the Portuguese vessel been 
 really guilty of a piratical aggression, wantonly
 
 12S 
 
 committed on the American cruiser, the act of Con- 
 gress would not only have warranted her capture, 
 but confiscation ; and that whatever responsihility 
 might he incurred hy the nation to foreign powers in 
 executing such laws, there could be no doubt that 
 courts of justice were bound to administer and obey 
 them. The Court also repeated its former decision 
 in the case of the Antelope, that the right of visita- 
 tion and search of vessels, armed or unarmed, 
 navigating the ocean, in time of peace, does not be- 
 long to the public ships of any nation. This right 
 was strictly a belligerent right, allowed by the gene- 
 ral consent of nations in time of war, and limited to 
 those occasions. It was true that it had been held 
 in the Courts of the United States, that American 
 ships offending against their laws, and foreign ships, 
 in like manner, offending within their jurisdiction, 
 might afterwards be pursued and seized upon the 
 ocean, and rightfully brought into their ports for 
 adjudication. This, however, had never been sup- 
 posed to draw after it any right of visitation and 
 search. The party, in such cases, seized at his 
 peril. If he established, the forfeiture he was justi- 
 fied ; if he failed, he must make full compensation 
 in damages. 
 
 o 
 
 Upon the ocean, then, in time of peace, all pos- 
 sessed an entire equality. It was the common high- 
 way of all, appropriated to the use of all; and no 
 one could vindicate to himself a superior or ex- 
 clusive prerogative there. Every ship sailed there 
 with the unquestionable right of pursuing her own
 
 129 
 
 lawful business without interruption ; but, whatever 
 might be that business, she was bound to pursue it 
 in such a manner as not to violate the rights of 
 others. The general maxim in such cases was, sic 
 utere tuo, ut non aUe?ium lasdas. 
 
 It had been argued that no ship has a right to ap- 
 proach another at sea, and that every ship had a 
 right to draw round her aline of jurisdiction, within 
 which no other is at liberty to intrude. In short, 
 that she might appropriate so much of the ocean as 
 she might deem necessary for her protection, and 
 prevent any nearer approach. 
 
 This doctrine appeared to the Court to be novel, 
 and was not supported by any authority. It went 
 to estabhsh upon the ocean a territorial jurisdiction, 
 like that which is claimed by all nations within can- 
 non-shot of their shores, in virtue of their general 
 sovereignty. But the latter right was founded upon 
 the principle of sovereign and permanent appropria- 
 tion, and had never been successfully asserted be- 
 yond it. Every vessel undoubtedly had a right to 
 the use of so much of the ocean as she occupied and 
 as was essential to her own movements. Beyond 
 this, no exclusive right had ever been recognised* 
 and the Court saw no reason for admitting its ex- 
 istence. Merchant ships are in the constant habit 
 of approaching each other on the ocean, either to 
 relieve their own distress, to procure information, 
 or to ascertain the character of strangers; and, 
 hitherto, there has never been supposed in such con- 
 duct any breach of the customary observances, or 
 17
 
 130 
 
 of the strictest principles of the law of nations. In 
 respect to ships of war, sailing, as in the present 
 case, under the authority of their Government, to 
 arrest pirates, and other public offenders, there was 
 no reason why they might not approach any vessels 
 descried at sea, for the purpose of ascertaining their 
 real character. Such a right seemed indispensable 
 for the fair and discreet exercise of their authority; 
 and the use of it could not be justly deemed indi- 
 cative of any design to insult or injure those they 
 approached, or to impede them in their lawful com- 
 merce. On the other hand, as it was as clear that 
 no ship is, under such circumstances, bound to lie 
 by, or wait the approach of any other ship. She is 
 at fun liberty to pu,rsue her voyage in her own way, 
 and to use all necessary precautions to avoid any 
 suspected sinister enterprize or hostile attack. She 
 had a right to consult her own safety, but at the 
 same time she must take care not to violate the 
 rights of others. She might use any precautions, 
 dictated by prudence or the fears of her officers, 
 either as to delay, or the progress, or course of her 
 voyao-e ; but she was not at liberty to inflict injuries 
 upon other innocent parties, simply because of con- 
 jectural dangers. These principles seemed to the 
 court the natural result of the common duties and 
 rights of nations navigating the ocean in time of 
 peace. Such a state of things carried with it very 
 different obligations and responsibilities from those 
 which belonged to public war, and was not to be 
 confounded with it.
 
 131 
 
 It had also been argued that there was a general 
 obligation upon armed ships, in exercising the right 
 of visitation and search, to keep at a distance out of 
 cannon-shot, and to demean themselves in such a 
 manner as not to endanger neutrals. The court 
 stated that it might be a decisive answer to this ar- 
 gument, that here no right of visitation and search 
 was attempted to be exercised. Lieutenant Stock- 
 ton did not claim to be a belligerent entitled to 
 search neutrals on the ocean. He did not approach 
 or subdue the Marianna Flora in order to compel 
 her to submit to his search, but with other motives. 
 He took possession of her, not because she resisted 
 the right of search, but because she attacked him in 
 a hostile manner, without any reasonable cause or 
 provocation. 
 
 The Court, applying these principles to the case 
 in judgment, determined that the gallant officer be- 
 fore it, was not, under the circumstances, liable in 
 costs and damages for seizing and bringing in the 
 Portuguese vessel, which, by her own improper con- 
 duct had led him into the mistake he had commit- 
 ted.* But, after all, the captor was in this case (to 
 use an expression of Lord Stowell) " saved as by 
 fire;" and the extreme caution the Court manifest, 
 in limiting the right of public armed vessels cruising 
 for pirates and slave-traders on the high seas, to the 
 mere authority of approaching suspicious vessels 
 for the purpose of ascertaining their real character, 
 
 * Wheaton's Reports, vol. xi. pp. 39, 40. The Marianna 
 Flora.
 
 132 
 
 by any means short of actual visitation and search, — 
 shows what would have been its opinion of the pre- 
 tension now advanced by the British Government, 
 of a right to ascertain, by visitation and search, the 
 national character of such vessels. 
 
 Lord Aberdeen proceeds in his letter of the 13th 
 October, 1841, to Mr. Stevenson, to state the parti- 
 cular nature and extent of the British claim of a 
 right of visitation, as he insists upon calling it, on 
 board vessels navigating the high seas in time of 
 peace. 
 
 " In certain latitudes, and for a particular object, the vessels, 
 referred to are visited, not as American, but either as British ves- 
 sels engaged in an unlawful traffic, and carrying the flag of the 
 United States for a criminal purpose, or as belonging to states 
 which have by treaty ceded to Great Britain the right of search, 
 and which right it is attempted to defeat by fraudulently bearing 
 the protecting flag of the Union; or, finally they are visited as 
 piratical outlaws, possessing no claim to any flag or nationality 
 whatever." 
 
 We may be excused for neglecting the qualifi- 
 cation of the right thus claimed, by limiting it to 
 certain latitudes and to a particular object, because, 
 if the right exist, it may be extended at the plea- 
 sure of the power claiming it to both the great 
 oceans which encircle the globe, and to any other 
 object which it may hereafter suit the ever-craving 
 appetite of dominion to embrace within its grasp. 
 We will, therefore, only observe that here are three
 
 133 
 
 classes of cases enumerated, in which the right of 
 visitation and search (for such we have shown it to 
 be) may be exercised under the British claim. The 
 first class is that of British vessels engaged in an 
 unlawful traffic, and seeking to screen their offence 
 under the American flag. The second consists of 
 vessels belonging to other states, which have by treaty 
 conceded to Great Britain the right of visitation 
 and search, and which right is attempted to be de- 
 feated by fraudulently bearing the protecting flag 
 of the United States. The third comprises piratical 
 outlaws, possessing no rightful claim to any flag or 
 national character whatsoever. 
 
 The British Secretary of State for Foreign Aff"airs 
 asserts that none of these classes of vessels have 
 any title to be exempted from the exercise of the 
 right of visitation and search claimed by Great 
 Britain. He adds, that if the visitation by a 
 British cruiser "should lead to the proof of the 
 American origin of the vessel, and that she was 
 avowedly engaged in the slave-trade, exhibiting to 
 view the manacles, fetters, and other usual imple- 
 ments of torture, or had even a number of these 
 unfortunate beings on board, no British officer 
 could interfere any farther." That is to say, if the 
 vessel in question turns out, in the judgment of the 
 British boarding officer, to be bond fidt American, 
 she must be released, although the proof be ever so 
 clear that she was actually engaged in the slave-trade. 
 
 But, we would respectfully ask, what if she 
 proves, in the judgment of the boarding officer, re-
 
 134 
 
 suiting from an examination of her papers and other 
 proofs, to fall within one of the above-described 
 classes of vessels — that is to say, to be a British ves- 
 sel disguised under the mask of the American flag 
 and papers ; or to belong to some one of the States 
 which have, by treaty, conceded to Great Britain 
 the right of visitation and search ; or, finally, to be 
 what Lord Aberdeen calls ^ piratical outlaw? What 
 farther proceedings are to be had in either or all of 
 these cases? There can, we conceive, be but one 
 answer to this question — namely, that the vessel, 
 thus visited and searched, must be carried into some 
 port of some country, for trial before some court of 
 justice. As before observed, the visitation would 
 be a worse tlian idle ceremony, unless followed by 
 search, and the search a wanton outrage unless the 
 vessel were to be carried in for adjudication, in case 
 she turned out, in the judgment of the boarding 
 officer, not to be American, and at the same time 
 to fall within some one of the categories above 
 enumerated. Now, this is precisely what happens 
 in the exercise of the belligerent right of visitation 
 and search, in time of war. If a vessel sailing un- 
 der the neutral flag is boarded and examined by a 
 bellio'erent armed and commissioned cruiser, and 
 the result of the examination establishes her neu- 
 trality in the judgment of the boarding officer, or his 
 superior commander, she is of course released, and 
 suff'ered to pursue her voyage. But if, on the other 
 hand, iheix prima facie judgment be, that the ship 
 or cargo is in reality enemy's property, or that the
 
 135 
 
 latter is contraband of war, or that the proprietor 
 or master have been guilty of some unneutral act, 
 by which the property is rendered liable to confis- 
 cation, the vessel is, of course, detained, and sent in 
 for trial in the competent Prize Court of the cap- 
 tor's country. The identity of the right, now for 
 the first time claimed by Great Britain, with the 
 belligerent right of visitation and search, which 
 Lord Stowell asserts, and Lord Aberdeen admits, 
 cannot exist in time of peace, thus becomes more 
 and more evident at every step we advance in the 
 progress of our investigation. 
 
 We repeat, if the seizure had been made in time 
 of war, the captured vessel must be carried into 
 port for adjudication before the competent Prize 
 Court of the captor's country. But it being made 
 in time of peace, the captured vessel, if belonging to 
 the first of the classes above mentioned, and seized 
 and proceeded against as a British vessel engaged 
 in violating the municipal laws of Great Britain, 
 must necessarily be tried before the Court of her 
 own supposed country. But what if she proves, on 
 trial, to be an American, though guilty of slave- 
 trading? — and what, if she turns out to be both 
 American, and innocent of all offence ? If there 
 should have been, in the opinion of the Court by 
 which the vessel is tried, such reasonable grounds 
 of suspicion as constitute probable cause of seizure, 
 the owners would not, according to the usual course 
 of the Admiralty, even be entitled to costs and 
 damages for the detention, which, in most cases.
 
 136 
 
 must be attended with the loss of the voyage. The 
 discretion of that Court is exercised in giving or re- 
 fusing costs and damages, in cases of marine torts, 
 with such arbitrary latitude, and is formed by such 
 merely equitable, and even politic considerations, 
 that it would be a very unsafe reliance for a foreign 
 claimant to look to for adequate indemnity in case 
 of wrongful seizure. In short, it would be easy to 
 show the multiplied embarrassments that must in- 
 evitably arise from this anomalous attempt to exe- 
 cute the laws of a particular state beyond its own 
 territorial jurisdiction on the high seas, in time of 
 peace, upon vessels suspected to be its own, and to 
 have fradulently assumed the flag and papers of 
 another nation. In time of war, such vessels may 
 be seized and proceeded against in the exercise of a 
 right incident to that of belligerent capture. Being 
 once brought before the Prize Court, such vessels 
 might be condemned on the ground that a British 
 subject has no persona standi injudicio to claim pro- 
 perty taken in the act of violating the municipal 
 laws of his own country, whilst the claim of the 
 American citizen would be at once rejected as 
 founded in fraud and supported by falsehood. It is 
 plain that the condemnation in the Court of Admi- 
 ralty cannot proceed upon such grounds in time of 
 peace. Doubtless, the laws of trade and navigation 
 of any particular country may be executed by the 
 seizure of the vessels proved to belong to that coun- 
 try, in a place which is not within the territory of a 
 particular state, such as the high seas. But such
 
 137 
 
 seizure must necessarily be made at the hazard of 
 mistaking the property of the citizens of another na- 
 tion for that of the subjects of the state under whose 
 authority the seizure is made. The right, then, 
 claimed by Great Britain, so far as respects the first 
 class of cases enumerated by Lord Aberdeen, comes 
 to this : — that it is a right to seize at the peril of the 
 captors, subject to full compensation in costs and 
 damages, in case the property turns out to be Ame- 
 rican as claimed, and there be not such reasonable 
 grounds of suspicion as constitutes what is techni- 
 cally called probahle cause of seizure. There being 
 no treaty and no public law applicable to the case, 
 against whom can the costs and damages be decreed 
 by which the injured party is to be indemnified ? 
 Who is to pay them, the captor or his Government ? 
 Under the special contracts entered into between 
 Great Britain and other powers, the jurisdiction to 
 try is conferred upon the tribunal of that nation to 
 whom the vessel appears, prima facie, by the flag 
 under which she sails, and by the flag alone, to be- 
 long ; and the costs and damages which may be al- 
 lowed by such tribunals, in case of wrongful seizure, 
 are to be paid by the Government of the captor.* 
 The neglect of the British Government to provide 
 an adequate indemnification for the losses and in- 
 juries already sustained in the various cases of 
 seizure of American vessels in the African seas, 
 
 * Convention of the 22ntl March, 1833, between France and 
 Great Britain, Articles 1 — 7. (Martens' " Nouveau Receiiil," 
 torn. ix. pp. 550 — 553.) 
 
 18
 
 138 
 
 affords but little encouragement for the United 
 States to acquiesce in the pretension of another na- 
 tion to determine for them, without their special con- 
 sent, the national character and proprietary interest 
 of vessels navigating the high seas in time of peace 
 under their flag and papers. 
 
 If, on the other hand, the seizure be of a vessel 
 appertaining to the second class, that of vessels sup- 
 posed to belong to States which have, by treaty, 
 conceded to Great Britain the right of visitation and 
 search, the trial must be had before the court of the 
 country to which the vessel is supposed to belong, 
 or before a Mixed Commission, as the one or the 
 other tribunal may have been provided by the com- 
 pact. But how can either of these tribunals acquire 
 jurisdiction over the vessels of a nation which is no 
 party to the treaty ? In one of the cases mentioned 
 in Mr. Stevenson's correspondence, that of the JagOy 
 sailing under the American flag and papers, the ves- 
 sel was sent into the British port of Sierra Leone 
 for trial before the British and Spanish mixed com- 
 mission at that place, which very properly refused 
 to take jurisdiction of the case. But suppose a ves- 
 sel, suspected to have fraudulently assumed the 
 American flag and papers, to be sent in for adjudi- 
 cation before the Court of the country to which she 
 is believed in fact to belong, under the Treaties of 
 1831 and 1833, between Great Britain and France, 
 or under the quintuple treaty of the 20th December 
 last ; and suppose she proves, on trial, to be bona 
 fide American, against whom are the costs and da-
 
 139 
 
 mages to be decreed, supposing the seizure not to be 
 justified on the ground of probable cause? Not 
 against the British captor, for the Court has no ju- 
 risdiction over him, except in the case of seizure of 
 a vessel belonging to the nations who are parties to 
 the treaties — not against his Government, for the 
 United States are no parties to the treaties; and one 
 of their citizens can claim no rights under the trea- 
 ties. 
 
 It thus appears that, in the cases supposed of an 
 attempt to execute the treaties against the vessels 
 of a nation, which is no party to the compact, that 
 such nation is placed in a much worse situation 
 than if it had actually acceded to its stipulations. 
 Instead of remaining under the tutelary protection 
 of the pre-existing law of nations, which exempts 
 its vessels on the high seas from the jurisdiction of 
 every other nation, and from all search and deten- 
 tion in time of peace, it is involuntarily exposed to 
 the exercise of the right of search, in the same 
 manner, and to the same extent, with those States 
 who have conceded the right by treaty ; and that, 
 without those securities against the but too pro- 
 bable abuse of the rights which are provided by the 
 compact to which it is no party. The British 
 claim, then, is, in effect, a claim to do that inde- 
 pendent of the compact, towards those who are no 
 parties to the compact, which the compact, for the 
 first time, authorized to be done towards any inde- 
 pendent nation whatsoever. To justify such preten- 
 sion, no arguments drawn from mere considerations
 
 140 
 
 of convenience, expediency, or even necessity, can 
 avail to supply the intrinsic legal defects of the pre- 
 tension itself Even if it were ever so clearly 
 proved, that the African slave-trade could be effect- 
 ually suppressed by the concession of the right of 
 search on the part of all nations ; which is so far 
 from being proved, that the direct contrary is con- 
 clusively demonstrated by fact and experience, ac- 
 cording to the opinion of one of the most distin- 
 guished enemies of the traffic, it would not follow 
 that even so great a good can lawfully be accom- 
 plished, by acting towards any one nation, even the 
 smallest and the weakest, as if it had freely made 
 the concession. Considerations of higher conve- 
 nience, expediency, and necessity, connected with 
 settled views, of policy as to national honour, and 
 rights and interests, stand in the way, in the opinion 
 of at least one great maritime nation, of its accomplish- 
 ment by the means proposed. The words of Lord 
 Stowell before quoted, here apply with all their 
 force of energetic expression and intrinsic wisdom : 
 *• No nation has a right to force its way to the 
 liberation of Africa, by trampling on the indepen- 
 dence of other States; or to procure an eminent 
 good by means that are unlawful ; or to press for- 
 ward to a great principle, by breaking through other 
 great principles that stand in the way." 
 
 We do not say that the matter in controversy is 
 not a proper subject of international legislation to 
 be undertaken at some auspicious moment ; but we 
 do say, so far as the United States are concerned,
 
 141 
 
 that the negotiation, which must precede the intro- 
 duction of a new public law of Europe and America 
 for the regulation of this matter, cannot be under- 
 taken on the basis of the previous admission of the 
 claim now set up by Great Britain, under the pre- 
 existing law of nations. Such an admission would 
 have been peremptorily and unanimously rejected 
 by the Powers, who, after long hesitation and re- 
 peated refusals, have at last concurred in making 
 the mutual concession of the right of search, under 
 certain qualifications, the ground-work of a more 
 comprehensive compact on this important question. 
 This compact is not yet consummated, between the 
 European Powers who are parties to it, by that 
 final sanction, which is necessary to make it obli- 
 gatory, even among them. The signature of the 
 quintuple treaty of the 20th December last, ap- 
 pears to have been anticipated by the President of 
 the United States, in his message to Congress, of 
 the 7th of that month.* The President, at the 
 same time, anticipated the answer, which the Cabi- 
 net of Washington cannot fail to give to all the 
 arguments which may be advanced from the Bri- 
 
 * " Whether this Government should now enter into treaties 
 containing mutual stipulations upon this subject, is a question for 
 its mature deliberation. Certain it is, that if the right to detain 
 American ships on the high seas can be justified on the plea of a 
 necessity for such detention, arising out of the existence of trea- 
 ties between other nations ; the same plea may be extended and 
 enlarged by new stipulations of new treaties, to which the United 
 States may not be parties."
 
 142 
 
 tish Foreign office, as to the supposed necessity of 
 exerting the right claimed by Great Britain, under 
 the pre-existing law of nations, in order to give 
 more complete effect to the treaties already entered 
 into, or which may be entered into between her and 
 other European States, to which treaties the United 
 States, are and may long remain utter strangers. 
 
 As to the third class of vessels supposed by Lord 
 Aberdeen to be justly liable to visitation and search 
 on the high seas in time of peace, that of " piratical 
 outlaws possessing no claim to any flag or nation- 
 ality whatever," we would merely observe that, if 
 by the term piratical outlaws be meant those who 
 are guilty of piracy under the law of nations, the 
 judgment of that enlightened tribunal, the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, in the case of the Mari- 
 anna Flora, above quoted is amply sufficient to dis- 
 pose of that class of cases, and to show that the pira- 
 tical character of vessels navigating the ocean must 
 be ascertained by means other than the exercise of 
 the ordinary right of visitation and search. In fact, 
 the character of pirates, properly so called, is sel- 
 dom difficult to be determined. These enemies of 
 the human race do not wait to be visited, but either 
 fly from pursuit, or commence a piratical aggres- 
 sion against those who would approach for the pur- 
 pose of ascertaining their real character. The pre- 
 sent maritime police is amply sufficient to protect 
 the peaceful navigator against sea-rovers; and there 
 is, in truth, no more reason for admitting the exer- 
 cise of a general right of visitation and search, in
 
 143 
 
 order to discover, arrest, and punish pirates, than 
 there is to require all travellers to be examined and 
 searched ; because there are occasionally some high- 
 way robberies committed in every civilized country. 
 The offence of piracy is in fact, at present, extremely 
 rare on every sea : aad the United States have found 
 no difficulty in effectually putting it down in the 
 American seas, without asserting an indiscriminate 
 right of search ; they do not claim it for themselves, 
 for any purpose, and they will not acknowledge it 
 in others. 
 
 But if by " piratical outlaws " be meant persons 
 engaged in the slave-trade, which, though formerly 
 tolerated, and even encouraged by every nation, is 
 now forbidden by the municipal laws of all civilized 
 and Christian countries, and is declared to be pi- 
 racy, and as such visited with capital punishment 
 by the laws of some States ; we would remark, that 
 it does not therefore follow that the offence of trading 
 in slaves is deemed piracy under the law of nations, 
 and as such punishable in the Courts of any coun- 
 try into which the offenders may be brought. The 
 attempt to introduce a new public law, making the 
 offence piracy, under the law of nations, failed at the 
 Congress of Verona ; it failed in the negotiations of 
 1823-4, between the American and British govern- 
 ments, although the former was extremely anxious 
 to make it the basis of a general concert among the 
 the States of Europe and America; it failed in the 
 more recent negotiations between the five great 
 European Powers, which finally resulted in the
 
 144 
 
 treaty of the 20tli December last. It is, therefore, 
 a looseness of language, fatal to all accurate reason- 
 ing, to call slave-traders "piratical outlaws," and to 
 assert that, for the sake of discovering and punish- 
 ing these persons as offenders against the law of 
 nations, a general right of search is to be assumed in 
 time of peace, as if cruising against slave-traders 
 were to be put on the same footing with public war 
 between sovereign communities. 
 
 It is quite clear that such a right can never be 
 established but by the voluntary consent of all civi- 
 lized States. The equality of nations in the eye of 
 that public law by which the great community of 
 Christendom is held together, forbids the idea of 
 any, even the smallest and weakest State, being co- 
 erced to consent to the establishment of a new rule 
 of international conduct. The supposition that the 
 five Great Powers of Europe intended, in tlieir re- 
 cently-projected compact, conceding the mutual 
 right of search, to bring to bear upon America the 
 moral weight of this Holy Alliance against the traf- 
 fic in human beings, in order to compel her to sa- 
 crifice her maritime rights to this object, is, there- 
 fore, wholly gratuitous and inadmissible ; and if 
 there be any of the intended contracting parties who 
 had such a design in view in procuring the assent 
 of others to the proposed compact, they are proba- 
 bly, by this time, convinced that the attempt will 
 be vain. The United States adopted the Euro- 
 pean law of nations when they separated from the 
 British empire. But it was the internal law of Eu-
 
 145 
 
 rope, as it stood on the footing of immemorial usage 
 and approved practice, and recognised by public 
 jurists of authority, at the time when the United 
 States declared their independence of Great Britain. 
 To borrow the language of the President's message 
 already referred to : — 
 
 " However desirous the United States may be for the suppres- 
 sion of the slave-trade, they cannot consent to interpolations in the 
 maritime code at the mere will and pleasure of other governments. 
 We deny the right of any such interpolation to any one, or all the 
 nations of the earth, without our consent. We claim to have a 
 voice in all amendments or alterations of that code ; and when we 
 are given to understand, as in this instance, by a foreign govern- 
 ment, that its treaties with other nations cannot be executed with- 
 out the establishment and enforcement of new principles of mari- 
 time police, to be employed without our consent, we must employ 
 a language neither of equivocal import, nor susceptible of miscon- 
 struction. American citizens prosecuting a lawful commerce in 
 the African seas, under the flag of their country, are not responsi- 
 ble for the abuse or unlawful use of that flag by others ; nor can 
 they rightfully, on account of any such alleged abuses, be inter- 
 rupted or detained on the ocean ; and if thus molested or detained, 
 whilst pursuing honest voyages, in the usual way, and violating no 
 law themselves, they are unquestionably entitled to indemnity." 
 
 Though the United States do not consider them- 
 selves bound by innovations, made, or attempted to 
 be made, without their consent, in the maritime law 
 of nations, since they became an independent power* 
 they do not the less desire to see substantial improve- 
 19
 
 146 
 
 ments effected in that code by the general assent of 
 all civilized states. Pacific and commercial from 
 inclination and habit, the American people wish to 
 see the same rules applied to hostilities by sea which 
 have so long contributed to mitigate the ferocity of 
 war by land. For this purpose they have ever 
 sought, in their treaties of navigation and com- 
 merce with other nations, to abolish the usage of 
 seizing and confiscating enemy's property in the 
 ships of a friend — that relic of a barbarous age, 
 when maritime warfare was identified with piracy, 
 by the ferocious manner in which it was carried on ; 
 and by which usage the peaceful intercourse of 
 commercial nations with those who continue to be 
 their friends, though involved in war with others, is 
 still interrupted, in the midst of the general efforts 
 of a more enlightened period to adopt a milder sys- 
 tem of international relations. Influenced by these 
 considerations, the United States, in the first com- 
 mercial treaty they formed with any foreign power, 
 that with France, of the 6th February, 1778, re- 
 cognised the principle of free navigation in time 
 of war, by adopting the maxim— ^rec ships, free 
 goods; which had been incorporated into the con- 
 ventional law of Europe, ever since the Peace of 
 Utrecht, 1713, though seldom or never observed in 
 practice towards neutrals by any of its maritime 
 states, when actually engaged in hostilities with 
 each other. France, soon after, became involved 
 in the war between Great Britain and her revolted 
 colonies ; and the French government issued, on
 
 147 
 
 the 26th July, 1778, an ordinance extending the 
 stipulations of the treaty of the 6th February to all 
 neutral states. The cause of American inde- 
 pendence, and of the free navigation of the seas, 
 thus became blended together, and was supported 
 by the joint efforts of France, Holland, and Spain, 
 sustaining the late British colonies in their struggle 
 for emancipation. The armed neutrality of 1780 
 was formed by the neutral powers of the Baltic for 
 the purpose of more accurately defining the rights 
 of free navigation, and its principles were acknow- 
 ledged by all the maritime states of Europe. The 
 American congress recognised these principles by 
 its ordinance of 1781, for the direction of the Ame- 
 rican cruisers and courts of prize. The war of the 
 American Revolution was at last terminated by the 
 treaty of peace signed at Versailles in 1783, by 
 which the independence of the United States was 
 acknowledged by Great Britain, and the treaties of 
 Utrecht, by which the freedom of neutral naviga- 
 tion was stipulated, were renewed and confirmed 
 between Great Britain, France, and Spain. In 
 1785, the United States concluded a treaty of com- 
 merce and navigation with Prussia, in which not 
 only the same liberal principles of the maritime law 
 of nations were recognised, but other stipulations 
 intended to mitigate the evils of war by land and 
 by sea, were inserted by the American negotiator, 
 Franklin, who carried into diplomacy the enlight- 
 ened spirit of the philosopher and philanthropist. 
 On the breaking out of the war of the French Re-
 
 148 
 
 volution in 1792-3, in which nearly all the powers 
 of Europe became involved, the United States sought 
 in vain to preserve those privileges of neutral com- 
 merce and navigation which had been guaranteed 
 by solemn treaties with the maritime states of the 
 European continent. Great Britain would not ac- 
 knowledge them in theory or in practice ; and those 
 very powers which stipulated to respect them, re- 
 membered to forget their own professions and pro- 
 mises, in their anxiety to crush a dangerous and 
 formidable enemy, who *' attempted to propagate 
 first her principles, and afterwards her dominion, 
 by the sword."* Hence the mutual interdictions of 
 neutral trade with each other, in corn and provi- 
 sions, published by the different belligerent powers ; 
 hence the revival by Great Britain of the rule of the 
 war of 1756, interdicting all neutral commerce with 
 the colonies of an enemy ; hence that foul brood of 
 paper-blockades, and orders in council, and imperial 
 decrees, by which European warfare was brought 
 back again to the barbarous practices of the darkest 
 age, and by which series of innovations and inter- 
 polations into the public code of nations, all neutral 
 commerce was ultimately prohibited, and America, 
 the only remaining neutral nation, was herself re- 
 luctantly compelled to take part in the war. During 
 all this period, the right of visitation and search con- 
 
 * Mr. Canning's despatch to Sir C. Stuart, 28th January, 
 1823. (British Annual Register, Vol. LXV. Public Documents, 
 p. 141.)
 
 149 
 
 tinued to be asserted by Great Britain, not only for 
 its original purpose of seizing enemy's property on 
 board neutral vessels, and for executing these bar- 
 barous edicts, but, in the case of the United States, 
 by impressing from under their flag those seamen 
 whom the British officers, in the exercise of an 
 arbitrary discretion, chose to denominate British 
 subjects. Had the practice of impressment, thus 
 exercised as an incident to the belligerent right of 
 visitation and search, been in fact applied to British 
 seamen only, the American Government might 
 have longer forborne to resist the application of a 
 principle against which it had never ceased to pro- 
 test. But when to the other violations of its mari- 
 time rights, was superadded the application of the 
 right of search to the impressment of American 
 citizens, thousands of whom were detained and 
 compelled to light the battles of Great Britain 
 against nations with whom their own country was 
 at peace, the American Government could no 
 longer hesitate to draw the sword in order to vin- 
 dicate the honour of its national flag. Hence its 
 invincible repugnance to recognise by express com- 
 pacts, to any extent or for any purpose, a right, 
 which, whether applied to merchandise or men, 
 is so capable of being abused by a gigantic naval 
 power. It is one thing to admit the right of visita- 
 tion and search, as applied in time of war for its 
 original, legitimate objects, recognised by usage and 
 by the positive, if not by the natural law of nations ; 
 and it is another and very different thing, to consent
 
 150 
 
 to extend that right to a state of peace, and to ob- 
 jects foreign to those for which it was originally 
 established. The United States have never pre- 
 tended that Great Britain could lawfully be com- 
 pelled by force to abandon the belligerent right of 
 visitation and search, however anxious they may 
 have been to establish by general compact the 
 maxim, oi free ships, free goods, by which the ex- 
 ercise of the right would be limited to the sole cases 
 of contraband and blockade only. On the other 
 hand, it cannot be pretended that the United States 
 may be compelled by force or by that moral duress 
 which is equivalent to the application of force, to 
 abandon the immunity of their flag from the ex- 
 ercise of that right in time of peace. Their conclu- 
 sive objection to its extension by special compact, 
 in peace or in war, in any form, and under any 
 restrictions, which have heretofore been proposed, 
 is not merely that it may be liable to abuse, as ex- 
 perience has but too well proved ; but that such ex- 
 press recognition might involve by implication the 
 establishment of maxims relating to neutral naviga- 
 tion, the reverse of those which they have ever 
 sought to incorporate into the international code by 
 the general concurrence of maritime states. "The 
 encroaching character of the right, founded in its 
 original nature as an irresponsible exercise of force," 
 with its tendency to grow and gather strength by 
 exercise, render it the more necessary, in their 
 opinion, to be cautious in furnishing fresh prece- 
 dents of its extension to new objects, and to a larger
 
 151 
 
 sphere of operation. It was, therefore, with great 
 satisfaction, that we recently heard the assurance 
 solemnly given from the legislative tribune, by the 
 constitutional organ of the French Government, in 
 respect to foreign relations, that " the United States 
 were free, and would remain free," in regard to this 
 matter. That is to say, as we understood the de- 
 claration, that the liberty of action of the American 
 Government remains entire ; that it will neither be 
 constrained to accede to the treaties concluded, or to 
 be concluded between the European powers for 
 the mutual concession of the right of visitation and 
 search, nor compelled by any of the contracting 
 parties to submit to the exercise of that right as a 
 measure deemed indispensable to the effectual ac- 
 complishment of the object of those treaties.* 
 
 * " Messieurs, les Etats-Unis sont libres, ils resteront libres." 
 (M. Guizot's Speech in the Chamber of Deputies, January 
 24th, 1842.)
 
 LEA 8l BLANCHARD, 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, 
 
 HAVE RECENTLY PUBLISHED 
 
 THE LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE, 
 
 EARL OF ORFORD. 
 
 IN FOUR VOLUMES, OCTAVO, HANDSOMELY BOUND, CONTAINING NEARLY 
 
 THREX: HUNDRED ZiETTEBS, 
 
 NOW FIRST PUBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINALS, FORMING AN UNINTERRUPTED 
 
 SERIES, 
 
 FROM THE YEAR 1735 TO 1797. 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 HIS LETTERS TO 
 
 GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.— SIR HORACE MANN— RICHARD WEST, ESQ. 
 —LADY CRAVEN— GRAY (the poet)— HON. H. SEYMOUR CONWAY— 
 JOHN CHUTE, ESQ.— SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE— REV. WILLIAM MASON 
 —LADY HERVEY— THE EARL OF HERTFORD— RICHARD BENTLEY, 
 ESQ.— EARL OF STRAFFORD— MRS. HANNAH MORE— DAVID HUME, 
 ESQ.— COUNTESS OF AILESBURY — CAPTAIN JEPHSON — GEORGE 
 COLM.iN- MR. PINKERTON— THE MISS BERRYS, Sec. &c. 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 NUMEROUS UNPUBLISHED LETTERS. 
 
 Now first collected and chronologically arranged. In this edition the names formerly 
 only indicated by initials are inserted at full length. The whole with Notes, illuS' 
 trative and explanatory , from MSS. and other sources. 7'o which are added his 
 
 REMINISCENCES^ 
 
 FORMING, WITH THE LETTERS, 
 
 AN ANECDOTICAL HISTORY OF A GREAT PART OF THE 
 LAST CENTURY. 
 
 *** By an arrangement with the former publishers ofWalpole's Letters to George 
 Montagu, Esq. these Letters are also included in the present only complete edition of 
 the Letters of the Earl or Orford. 
 
 In former publications of Horace Walpole's Letters, the effect of these letters are 
 greatly marred by the suppression of names, or by the obscure indications of them 
 by initials only. Nearly half a century has, however, now elapsed since he lived; 
 and when it is considered that he survived almost all of whom he wrote, it is clear 
 that the delicacy which rendered this obscurity necessary on the first publication of 
 his Letters, exists no longer. In the present edition, therefore, these provoking 
 blanks are filled up; for which purpose the proprietor possesses advantages not at 
 the command of any other. To enhance the value of the collection, a considerable 
 number of Letters hitherto existing only in MS. are added, and the whole are now, 
 for the first time, chronologically arranged and illustrated by anecdotical and bio- 
 graphical Notes, from manuscript and other sources. 
 
 The most highly-valued contributor to the present complete collection of the epis- 
 tolary writings of the Earl of Orford, is his lordship's latest correspondent, one of 
 the ladies to whom he addressed his " Reminiscences of the Court of George II." 
 To this lady the world will be indebted, not only for a series of Letters which have 
 never seen the light, but for a variety of illustrative and interesting Notes, which 
 she alone could supply. To these are added a curious commentary on the " Remi- 
 niscences," supplied by the Letters of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and now first 
 published. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " Horace Walpole may decidedly claim pre-eminence for ease and lireliness of 
 expression, terseness of remark, and felicity of narration above almost all the epis-
 
 2 
 
 tolary writers of Britain. His 'Reminiscences of the Reigns of George land 11,' 
 make us better acquainted with the manners of those princes and the courts, than 
 we should be after perusing a hundred heavy historians; and futurity will long be 
 indebted to the chance which threw into his vicinity, w^hen age rendered him com- 
 municative, the accomplished ladies to whom these anecdotes were communicated. 
 The letters of Horace Waipole are indeed masterpieces in their way; they are the en- 
 tertaining and lively registers of the gay and witty who have long fluttered and flirted 
 over the fashionable stage, till pushed ofi"by a new race of persifleurs. Their variety, 
 as well as their peculiar and lively diction, renders them very entertaining. We 
 shall look in vain to history for such trails of character as those which Horace 
 Waipole records of stout old Balmerino, when under sentence of death. We quote 
 from Mr. Bentley's general edition of Walpole's Letters, a collection into one view 
 and regular order of that vast correspondence, which, besides its unrivalled beauty 
 and brilliancy, has the more important merit of being the liveliest picture of man- 
 ners, and the best epitome of political history that not only this, but any county pos- 
 sesses." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 " Walpole's Letters are full of wit, pleasantry, and information, and written with 
 singular neatnesy and sprightliness. Letters are certainly the honestest records of 
 great minds that we can become acquainted with; and we like them the more, for 
 letting us into the follies and treacheries of high life, the secrets of the gay and 
 the learned world, and the mysteries of authorship. We are ushered, as it were, 
 behind the scenes of life, and see gay ladies and learned men, the wise, the witty, 
 and the ambitious, in all the nakedness, or undress at least, of their spirits. Wai- 
 pole is equally sprightly and facetious, whether he describes a king's death and fune- 
 ral, or a quirk of George Selwyn; and is nearly as amusing when he recounts the 
 follies and the fashions of the' day as when he solemnizes into the sentimental." — 
 Edinburgh Review. 
 
 " One of the most useful and important publications that has issued from the press 
 for the last quarter of a century. It is illustrated with notes, drawn up with con- 
 summate tact, and is, moreover, embellished with numerous portraits of many of the 
 most celebrated wits, statesmen, and beauties of the last century. Such a work, so 
 enriched with all that is necessary to render it complete, is one of the most valuable 
 that any lover of sterling English literature can possess." — Sun. 
 
 "Asa book of reference, this edition of Walpole's Letters must henceforth take its 
 place among the memoirs and histories of the time. As a book of gossip, it is per- 
 haps the completest work of the kind in the English language." — The Times. 
 
 " One of the very best works of its class, if not unique, in the English language; a 
 work full of information, full of anecdote, and full of amusement; equally fit for the 
 library of the scholar, the dilettante, the artist, the statesman, and the general 
 reader." — Literary Gazette. 
 
 " Walpole's Letters are unequalled in our language; delightful in themselves, and 
 a most amusing and instructive commentary on the history of parties, and of the 
 country, from 1735 to 1797. This edition contains not only all the letters that have 
 been published, but several hundred more which have hitherto existed only in manu- 
 script, or made iheir appearance singly and incidentally in other works; the whole is 
 arranged in chronological order." — Alhenamn. 
 
 "In this edition, besides the letters to Miss Berry, are some to the Hon. H. S. Con- 
 way, John Chute, Esq., many to Lady Suffolk— his brother-in-laAv, Charles Churchill 
 — Captain Jephson — the Earl of Buchan— the Earl of Charlemont— Lord Hailes — 
 Gibbon— Mr. Pitt (afterwards Earl of Chatham)— George Hardinge— Mr. Pember- 
 ton, and other distinguished characters. Explanatory notes, in many parts, add to 
 the value of the present collection, which now first published, enjoys two signal 
 advantages over all its predecessors. It is the only complete edition of the incom- 
 parable letters of this ' prince of epistolary writers,' as he has been justly called; 
 and the letters themselves are arranged in chronological orAer."—DvJ)lin Evening 
 Mail. 
 
 " Horace Waipole never disappoints his reader; his letters are invariably preg- 
 nant with wit; none can raconter so delightfully as he, introduce an anecdote with 
 so much point, or paint a character so epigrammatically, and so well. His fame 
 is now fixed beyond the chance of accident, and will remain so until wit becomes 
 obsolete, and dulness a desideratum. Those who have never yet read Horace 
 Walpole's letters— and they must be still in their teens— have much enjoyment 
 before them; those who are familiar with his style, including all who deserve to 
 read, will here renew the pleasure they have so often experienced." — Morning 
 Herald.
 
 THE SPEECHES 
 
 OP 
 
 HENRY LORD BROUGHAM, 
 
 UPON QUESTIONS RELATING TO PUBLIC RIGHTS, DUTIES, 
 AND INTERESTS, 
 
 WITH HISTORICAL INTRODUCTIONS. 
 
 In two handsome volumes, bound in embossed cloth, or law sheep. 
 Contents. — Military Flogging — Clueen Caroline — Libel on the Durham Clergy — 
 Dissertation on the Law of Libel — Commerce and Manufactures — Agricultural 
 and Manufacturing Distress — Army Estimates — Holy Alliance — Slavery — Law 
 Reform — Parliamentary Reform — Education — Poor Laws — Scotch Parliamentary 
 and Burgh Reform — Scotch Marriage and Divorce Bill — Establishment of the 
 Liverpool Mechanics' Institute — Speech on Neutral Rights — Affairs of Ireland — 
 Speech at the Grey Festival— Change of Ministry in 1834 — Business of Parlia- 
 ment — Maltreatment of the North American Colonies — Speech on the Civil List 
 — Privilege of Parliament. 
 
 " The period embraced by these two volumes extends over a space of thirty years, 
 from 1810 to 1840, a most exciting period, during all of which Mr. Brougham, or 
 Lord Brougham, played a most distinguished part; and upon the character and events 
 of which he excited no mean influence. 
 
 The two volumes in which the Philadelphia publishers have put forth these 
 speeches, are large and handsome. The speeches themselves all treating of great pub- 
 lic questions and interests, survive and will live long and far beyond the occasions that 
 called them forth; while in the historical introductions to each, explanatory of the time 
 and the circumstances in which it was made, and tracing occasional sketches of con- 
 temporaneous characters, such light is thrown upon the whole subject, as to enab)(» 
 even uninstructed readers to enter understandingly into the merits of each case.'' — 
 New York American. 
 
 "In brief, the biographical ligaments whichbind together the subjects so ably han- 
 dled in these volumes, impart compactness, strength, and beauty to the whole, and 
 the head of a family who introduces such works to his sons and daughters, secures 
 to them an inheritance which must endure to them for the whole period of existence. 
 As to the author, he has the proud assurance that the benign influence of his labours 
 will endure through all time, and to a lesser or greater extent over every nation of 
 he earth." — National Intelligencer. 
 
 " It would be useless for us to do anything more than call the attention of statists 
 and civilians to such a work as this — containing, as it does, all the chief forensic 
 eflforts of one of the mightiest of human minds, rich with great and varied learning, 
 and clothed with the drapery of an eloquence that is unsurpassed. Here are col- 
 lected all the speeches of England's intellectual giant upon the great subjects, the agi- 
 tation of which has so often caused the British isles to tremble to their bases. Who 
 that read with almost breathless interest the memorable trial of Clueen Caroline, 
 twenty-one years ago, will not be eager to revive the history by a perusal of 
 Brougham's mighty speeches in behalf of that singular and most unfortunate woman, 
 as revised in the maturity of his years by his own hand"? Where the lawyer, or the 
 studious layman, who does not wish to possess Brougham's stupendous speech upon 
 the great law-reform in England which he commencedl Where the politician who 
 desires not to possess the speeches of this great champion of human liberty, on the great 
 reform questions, in the discussion and adoption of which he bore so distinguished 
 a parti Who does not desire to possess all the speeches of this great philanthro- 
 pist on the subject of the poor laws, the education of the people, the law of libel, and 
 other great topics of universal concernmenf? Weil, in the two large volumes before 
 us, all these proud efforts of human learning, genius, and intellect, are embodied — 
 each speech being preceded by a historical introduction of the occasion and circum- 
 stances under which it was delivered. No English library will be complete without 
 these volumes." — New York Commercial. 
 
 " These volumes contain a mine of literary and political wealth strongly charac- 
 teristic, both in manner and matter, of this great and original genius. The inde- 
 pendence, the vigour, the manliness of thought, which is here displayed, and the 
 stores of wisdom and learning with whicli the volumes abound, cannot fail to secure
 
 for their illustrious author a more full appreciation than he has, in this couuirj, 
 especially enjoj-ed. Untrammelled by the shackles of custom, or prejudice, he here 
 rises proudly above old beaten tracks, and with a sublimity of moral courage chal- 
 lenging the warmest admiration, he strikes into new paths, exposing the errors of 
 those who have preceded him in untiring and unceasing labours, and proclaiming 
 high and noble principles of substantial reform and melioration." — Madisonian. 
 
 " These volumes exhibit the power and profundity of his genius in the department 
 of intellect in which he is perhaps greatest. The publishers have conferred a sub- 
 stantial benefit on the lovers of forensic eloquence, by placing before them these 
 noble illustrations. Lord Brougham's allusions to our government, national charac- 
 ter, and struggles for independence, are compliments which a great and growing 
 nation cannot despise when offered by such a man. In fine, this is a book which 
 may be glanced at with pleasure, or read and studied for deep instruction with 
 which it is fraught. As models of oratorical composition, these speeches should 
 form the text-book of the aspirant for forensic honours." — New Orleans Bee. 
 
 THE 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 POPES OF ROME, 
 
 DURING THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES 
 By LEOPOLD RANKE, 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN. 
 
 Translated from the German by Sarah Austin. 
 In 2 volumes. 
 
 " To the high qualifications of profound research, careful accuracy, great fairness 
 and candour, with a constant reference to the genius and spirit of each successive 
 age, common to the historians of Germany, Mr. Ranke adds the charm of a singu- 
 larly lucid, terse and agreeable style." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 "It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book, excellently 
 translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is known and esteemed wherever 
 German literature is studied; and has been found interesting even in a most inaccu- 
 rate and dishonest French version. It is, indeed, the work of a mind fitted both for 
 minute researches and for large speculations. Ills written also in an admirable spirit, 
 equally remote from levity and bigotry; serious and earnest, yet tolerant and impar- 
 tial. It is, therefore, with the greatest pleasure that we now see it take its place 
 among the English classics. Of the translation, we need only say that it is such as 
 mi^ht be expected from the skill, the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of the accom- 
 plished lady, who, as an interpreter between the mind of Germany and the mind of 
 Great Britain, has already deserved so well of both countries." — Edinburgh Review, 
 
 LIVES OF 
 
 SMINBHT LITBRARir AND SCIENTId 
 
 MSN OP ITAL1?. 
 
 BY MRS. SHELLY, SIR DAVID BREWSTER, JAMES 
 MONTGOMERY, AND OTHERS. 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 DANTE, GALILEO, PETRARCH, TASSO, BOCCACCIO, VITTORIA CO- 
 LONNA, LORENZO DE MEDICI, TASSONI, ARIOSTO, MARINI, MACHIA- 
 VELLI, &c. &c. 
 
 In 2 volumes, VZmo. 
 " These volumes contain biographical notices, more or less complete, of twenty- 
 Iwo of those names, many of which not only constitute the glory of Italy, but have 
 stamped the impress of their genius upon all succeeding generations in every civiU 
 
 ]
 
 ized country. The Lives commence with that of Dante, and end with Ugo Poscolo, 
 Iwo persons, who, in the character of their minds and tone of their feelings and sen- 
 timents, seem to us, though living so many centuries apart, to have borne a remark- 
 able relation to one another. 
 
 " The subjects which these volumes embrace, are too ample for discussion within 
 the limits of a daily journal — all that we can say is, that we have read them with 
 great satisfaction and constant instruction. In general, the lives are treated with 
 sufficient detail as to facts and dates, with an enlarged philosophical spirit, with 
 sound and discriminating criticism." — iV. Y. Atnerican. 
 
 THE CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF 
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "PELHAM," "THE DISOWNED," &C. 
 
 In 2 vols. l2mo. 
 
 "These volumes are the miscellaneous writings of that great author — great in his 
 genius, great in his attainments, and but for an unhappy obliquity in certain of his 
 works of fiction, great in all his writings. But in these essays, we have not those 
 objectionable pictures which we may censure in his novels. We may differ from 
 the distinguished author in some of his opinions of men, and things, and morals, but 
 as a whole, his miscellaneous writings must command the applause of the critic, 
 while they rivet the attention of every class of readers. 
 
 " It is refreshing to sit down and, for an hour, to hold converse with such a spirit as 
 Bulwer's; to sit in the light of his genius, to feel its warmth, and to own a sympathy 
 with his views. We forget what we have to condemn in his novels, in the amount 
 which we have to approve in his essays." — U. S. Gazette. 
 
 THE CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF 
 
 HENRY LORD BROUGHAM. 
 
 TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, 
 
 A SKETCH OF HIS CHARACTER. 
 
 In 3 royal l2mo, volumes. 
 
 Contents. — George the Fourth and Queen Caroline — Diary of the times of George 
 the Fourth. The dueen's letter to the King. Political characters — Remarks on 
 an article in the Edinburgh Review, &c. &c. by Sir Herbert Taylor. Public 
 Characters — Correspondence of William Pitt, Lord Chatham. Congress of Ve- 
 rona—Chateaubriand and Talleyrand. Public Characters — Biographical Trea- 
 sury containingn otices of the lives of eminent persons, &c. George the Third 
 and the Catholic CLuestion — Letters from his late Majesty to the late LordKenyon 
 on the Coronation Oath, &c. &c. Discourse on the Objects, Advantages, and Plea- 
 sures of Science, published under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffu- 
 sion of Useful Knowledge. Historical note on the discovery of the Theory of the 
 Composition of Water, published as an appendix to a memoir of James Watt. 
 Review of "Black's Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry," from the Edinburgh 
 Review of October, 1803. London University and King's College — Second State- 
 ment by the Council of the University of London, explanatory of the Plan of In- 
 struction. Junius Identified — The identity of Junius with a distinguished living 
 character established. A supplement to Junius Identified — Consisting of fac-simi- 
 les of hand-writing and other illustrations. Neutral Ctuestion, from the Edinburgh 
 Review of October, 1807. Revolution in France — Reflexions sur la France; vices 
 de son Gouvernement; causes du M^contentement des Francaise sous le Minist6re 
 de Polignac, &c.— par M. St. Maurice. 
 
 1*
 
 6 
 THE FOURTH EDITION OF 
 
 DUNGLISON'S HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 WITH NUMEROUS ADDITIONS AND MODIFICATIONS. 
 
 In 2 volumes, 8vo, 
 
 " Professional readers and students are fully aware of the value of this work; but 
 that is not the case with persons unconnected with the profession of medicine. To 
 such persons it may be sufficient to say, that Dunglison's Physiology is so clearly writ- 
 ten, the various objects so well illustrated by engravings; in short, the work is so com- 
 plete in all its parts and as a whole, that the knowledge contained in it is available 
 to all classes, clerical, legal, medical, or commercial. And why should any man 
 who is liberally educated, remain ignorant upon a subject of so much interest! What 
 library can be considered complete, wanting a good book of reference or study on 
 the subject of Physiologyl The book under notice is so arranged that it might not 
 be improperly designated an ' Encyclopedia of Physiology;' and examination will 
 satisfy the most doubting, that it is the most complete work on Physiology at pre- 
 sent before the public." — Nat. Gazette. 
 
 " On comparing this fourth, with the third edition of the work named above, it 
 will be found that a great deal of labour has been successfully bestowed in improv- 
 ing the book. It is only by comparison that the superiority of the fourth edition will 
 be recognized; for the third edition is so full and clear upon all the various points 
 of the subject, that there seemed to be nothing to be added. Yet we find the learned 
 author offers us additional facts and opinions, directly or indirectly drawn from the 
 scientific springs of Germany, France, and England, which are respectively placed 
 under their appropriate heads in the work, instead of being added in an appendix 
 with letters of reference at the bottom of the pages — the usual practice of indolent 
 writers." — U. S. Gazette. 
 
 1 
 
 A NEW EDITION OF 
 
 ARNOTT'S ELEMENTS OF PHYSICS; 
 
 OR, NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 GENERAL AND MEDICAL. 
 WRITTEN FOR rNIVERSAL USE, IN PLAIN AND NON-TECHNICAL LANGUAGE. 
 
 Complete in one volume. 
 
 Revised and Corrected from the last English Edition, 
 
 WITH ADDITIONS BY ISAAC HAYS, M.D. 
 
 From the National Gazette. 
 
 " This most excellent text-book, which is written without the use of technical terms, 
 may on the appearance of a new edition be again commended to general notice. The 
 various treatises formeily issued separately, are now comprised by the able Ameri- 
 can editor in one volume. It is thus briefly noticed in Waldie's Library: 
 
 " ' Arnott's Physics has long been a favourite text-book of natural philosophy in 
 our colleges and higher schools. Its plain, popular style, the familiarity of the illus- 
 trations, the strictly practical character of the instruction it contains, and its scien- 
 tific accuracy, place it in the first rank of works in this department of knowledge. 
 The edition before us is just published: it contains the results of all the recent inqui- 
 ries in the various departments of physics, and the whole work, hitherto published 
 in several volumes, but now comprised in one, becomes the cheapest and best 
 work extant on the subject. It will soon be exclusively used in colleges and high 
 schools.' 
 
 " This treatise is superior to any similar work with which we are acquainted, for 
 general use. It is written in a plain and familiar style, without the use of technical 
 terms and descriptive words derived from dead languages, and not to be understood 
 but by scholars and men who have made languages and sciences the study of years. 
 We know of no work, unless it be Bigelow's Technology, that can bear any com- 
 parison with this as an entertaining and instructive book for families or schools." — 
 Boston Courier.
 
 A THIRD EDITION OF 
 
 THE BIOGRAPHY AND POETICAL REMAINS 
 
 OK THE LATE 
 
 MARGARET MILLER DAVIDSON. 
 
 BY WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 
 In one volume, handsomely hound in embossed cloth. 
 
 " The volume here presented is very attractive. The Biography by Irving de- 
 rives a great interest from the affectionate dignity with which a mother, not unwor- 
 thy of such daughters, seems to have preserved the record of the development of the 
 powers of mind, and graces of character, of her gifted and fated child; while the 
 prose and poetical remains attest the taste and talent which a premature grave 
 snatched from the world." — New York American. 
 
 " The particulars of Margaret's career, which have been obtained by Mr. Irving 
 principally from her mother and family, and are recorded in his usual fascinating 
 style, will be found of intense and melancholy interest; her poetical efforts, from the 
 age of eight years till her early death at fifteen, display an activity of intellect truly 
 remarkable, and which will too readily account for her premature decease. This 
 work cannot fail to find high favour with the public." — Pennsylvanian. 
 
 THE POETICAL REMAINS 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 LUCRETIA M. DAVIDSON. 
 
 COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY HER MOTHER. 
 WITH A BIOGRAPHY BY MISS SEDGWICK. 
 
 In one handsome volume, to match Irving^ s Biography of Margaret. 
 
 "We have read the contents of these volumes with serene and sober delight. 
 They possess a charm which, to us, is irresistible, and which forbids the intrusion of 
 any other feeling than one of respect, of wonder, or of love. The pieces in the 
 volume now before us, (whi-ch is printed and bound in a style to correspond with the 
 Remains of Margaret,) are mostly tinctured with the hue of melancholy; there are 
 few of them that do not convey a moral; and many appear to have been written 
 under the influence of serious impressions and deep devotional feeling."— .Bos^ow 
 Courier. 
 
 " In disposition, Miss Davidson was a creature of surpassing loveliness. Her 
 heart was full of noble, pure, generous and holy motives and aspirations. Nothing 
 can be more touching than her history. It is a lesson which may improve every 
 reader. To the young it is an example which might affect the most callous and 
 mend the most depraved — an example of devotion to every duty — of resignation 
 under affliction, even to the approach of certain death. Miss Sedgwick's memoir is 
 worthy of the subject. It is written with taste and feeling, and throws a charm over 
 the works of the lamented poetess." — Nat. Gazette. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF 
 
 REGINALD HZIBER, 
 
 LATE BISHOP OF CALCUTTA. 
 
 Complete in one handsome volume, hound in embossed cloth, or in extra 
 bindings, with gilt edges. 
 
 "The name of Bishop Heber is dear to all who love to see intellectual power in 
 connection with great moral worth. The present collected edition of his poems will 
 undoubtedly acquire a considerable circulation among those who justly hold his 
 name in veneration. The light of his genius was not of that kind which 'lured 
 astray,' but it was in truth 'light from heaven.' Many of his smaller pieces are ex- 
 ceedingly beautiful and touching." — Times. 
 
 " Who among the lovers of pure, heavenly poetry, has not read with delight many 
 of the exquisite productions of this eminent and highly-gifted prelate? I can con- 
 ceive of no higher earthly gratification than that enjoyed, and unexpectedly too, by 
 the father of Heber, who was one of an audience than which none was ever more 
 learned or distinguished, before which the son, at the early age of nineteen years, 
 pronounced, with unsurpassed grace and effect, his masterly prize poem, ' Palestine,' 
 included, of course, in this collection. It is said that the father was carried fai^'ing- 
 from the hall." — Madisonian.
 
 8 
 
 THE WORKS OF MRS. HEMANS, 
 
 COMPLETE. 
 
 INCLUDING A MEMOIR BY HER SISTER. 
 AND AN ESSAY ON HER GENIUS, BY MRS. SIGOURNEY. 
 A new and beautiful edition, printed on fine paper, with a portrait of the author- 
 ess, handsomely bound in embossed cloth, or in calf and morocco, extra, with gilt 
 edges, forming one of the most beautiful presents of the season. 
 In 7 vols, royal 12mo. 
 This is the only complete edition of the works of Mrs. Hemans, and contains 
 many new poems, together with other matter not embraced in any other edition of 
 her works. 
 
 KSBIaE'S CHRISTIAN ITESAR. 
 
 THOUGHTS IN VERSE, 
 
 FOR SUNDAYS AND HOLY DAYS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. 
 
 BY THE REV. JOHN KEBLE, 
 
 FROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 " In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." — Isaiah, xxx. 15. 
 
 Tbe Third Edition, 
 
 With a farther revision; and an Introduction by the Rev. George W. Doane, Bishop 
 of New Jersey. In one neat volume. 
 " These verses are singularly beautiful in conception and composition, and breathe 
 the purest poetic taste, and the most sincere and fervent spirit of piety." — Ga-zette. 
 
 THE 
 
 LIFE AND LITERARY REMAINS OF L. E. L. 
 
 (miss landon.) 
 BY LA MAN BLANCHARD. 
 
 In 2 handsome \2mo. Volumes. 
 
 A MEMOIR OF THE 
 
 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MRS. HEMANS. 
 
 BY HER SISTER, MRS. HUGHES. 
 In one Volume, l2mo. 
 
 SKETCHES OF CONSPICUOUS 
 
 LIVING CHARACTERS OF FRANCE. 
 
 Containing Thiers, Chateaubriand, Lafitte, Guizot, La Martine, George Sand, (Madame 
 Dudevant,) Odillon Barrot, The Duke de Broglie,Soult, Berryer, De La Mennais, Victor 
 Hugo, Dupiu, Berangrer, Arago. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY R. M. WALSH. 
 
 WITH A PORTRAIT OF THIERS. 
 
 In one Volume. 
 
 STORIES FOR VERY YOUNG CHILDREN, 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY NUMEROUS WOOD CUTS, CONTAINING 
 
 WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER AND AUTUMN, 
 
 BY MRS. MARCET, 
 
 AUTHOR OF CONVERSATIONS ON CHEMISTRY. 
 
 In Four Parts, neatly done up in Printed Covers, or all bound in one Volume, embossed 
 cloth: forming an interesting Holiday Present for Children. 
 "These four little quartos are very appropriate gifts for young children, and now, 
 too, is the season for making such gifts; their authoress is quite popular with the 
 young, and these contain many engravings to add to the interest. The type is clear 
 and plain, and the children of the family will take much pleasure in spelling out 
 the stories. — Evening Gazette.
 
 WASHINGTOH SRVIHG'S WORKS. 
 
 A NEW AND BEAUTIFUL EDITION 
 
 OF THE 
 
 WORKS OF WASHINGTON IRVING, 
 
 EMBRACING 
 
 " THE SKETCH BOOK," " KNICKERBOCKER'S NEW YORK," 
 
 " BRACEBRIDGE HALL," "TALES OF A TRAVELLER," 
 
 " THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA," " THE ALHAMBRA." 
 
 In Two Royal Octavo Volumes, with a Portrait of the Author. 
 
 Each of the Works embraced in this Edition may be had separately, in 
 two volumes l2mo. 
 
 THB RGCKir MOUNTAINS; 
 
 OR SCENES, INCIDENTS, AND ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST. 
 
 Willi two large Maps. In two Volumes. 
 
 ASTORIA: 
 
 OR ANECDOTES OF AN ENTERPRISE BEYOND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 
 
 la Two Volumes. 
 
 A HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND VOYAGES OF 
 
 CHRISTOPHER COli'UmB'UBi 
 
 Revised and corrected by the Author. In Two Vols. Octavo. 
 
 THE CRAirON MISCELLANY. 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 ** A TOUR ON THE PRAIRIES," " ABBOTSFORD AND NEWSTEAD ABBEY," 
 " LEGENDS OF THE CONQUEST OF SPAIN." 
 
 In Three Volumes, 12mo. 
 
 THE BEAUTIES OP WASHIKTGTOISJ IRVIETG. 
 
 A small volume for the pocket, neatly done up in extra cloth. 
 
 COOPER'S NAVAL HISTORY 
 
 OP 
 
 THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 In two handsome volumes, bound in embossed cloth. 
 
 A new edition, revised and corrected, with an index to the volumes. 
 
 " The History of the Navy of the United States from the earliest period of its 
 existence, in the dawn of the Revolution, through all its discouragements, reverses, 
 trials, and glory, was a task worthy of the author, who had established a reputation, 
 as a deseriber of nautical events, superior to that of any other living writer. The 
 task has been so performed as to leave nothing to desire. No work of higher interest 
 has been published in the United States for many years. The theme is one which 
 Mr. Cooper seems to treat con amore, and for which his early life and education 
 fitted him, above all other men. If we are not mistaken, the publication of this 
 book is calculated to heighten the already exalted estimate in which the Navy is 
 held, and to render it still more, if possible, a favourite with the nation. "Whilst 
 Mr. Cooper has, at all times, given full credit to the oflicers and crews of the vessels 
 "whose victories, during the late war, shed so much renown upon our arms, he has 
 not been guilty of the bad taste, which a writer of less discrimination would scarcely 
 have avoided, of indulging a vainglorious spirit and a disparaging tone in reference 
 to our great rival upon the ocean. The glories of American victories are fully 
 portrayed, whilst, at the same time, care is taken, in every case, to exhibit a fair 
 and impartial estimate of the strength and appointments of antagonists' vessels or 
 fleets. In this way the work acquires the credit due to a grave and impartial his- 
 tory." — Baltimore Chronicle.
 
 10 
 3VIR. COOPER'S MEW NOVEL. 
 
 THE DEERSLAYER; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE FIRST WAR PATH. 
 
 A TALE OF THE EARLY DAYS OF NATTY BUMPO AND CHINGACHGOOK. 
 
 By the author of '■^Tht Last of the Mohicans,''^ '■'•The Prairie,''^ ^^ Pioneers,'''' ^c. ^c. 
 
 In 2 volumes, l2mo. 
 
 "Written in Mr. Cooper's best style; the style which won him his repute, and by 
 ■which he will live. 'Deerslayer' is no other than our famous Hawkeye, immortal 
 Leatherstocking, now the hero of Mr. Cooper's five best tales." — Examhier. 
 
 " All who perused with so much delight the earliest and best novels of Mr. Cooper, 
 will at once find themselves again led on, in this new romance, by the same spirit of 
 ardent excitement felt while reading those productions." — Globe. 
 
 " Mr. Cooper's earlier romances created so pleasant a sensation among novel 
 readers in general, that they will hear he has returned to the style of his efforts with 
 no little gratification. The ' Deerslayer' is more worthy of his high reputation than 
 any of his latter productions; it is indeed a stirring tale of the early history of Ame- 
 rica — full of startling incidents and thrilling descriptions — the characters, though 
 few in number, are most ably drawn, and the locality (for there is no change of 
 scene) admirably depicted. The heroine is quite a portrait; and ' Deerslayer' one 
 of the fine borderers peculiar to Mr. Cooper's tales." — Land. Lit. Gaz. 
 
 MERGEIDISS OP CASTILB. 
 
 ROMANCE OF THE DAYS OF COLUMBUS. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF THE "PILOT," &C. «fec. 
 
 In Two volumes. 
 
 A FINS EDITION OF THE 
 
 LEATHERSTOCKING TALEH: 
 
 EMBRACING 
 
 The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, The Prairie, and The Last of the 
 
 Mohicans. 
 
 In Five Volumes, 12mo. bound in embossed cloth. 
 
 " Cooper has now followed the borderer through every stage of his existence, from 
 the young scout to the trapper on the western prairies. The five tales may be con- 
 sidered as forming one continued story, in which the heroes and heroines of the 
 several plots are accessaries only to the history of ' Hawkej'e,' around whom the 
 chief interest, after all, revolves. The idea of carrying one character through seve- 
 ral tales is one successfully achieved by Shakspeare, and we may also say, success- 
 fully imitated by Cooper." — Sat. Eve. Post. 
 
 A NEW EDITION, COMPLETE, OF 
 
 COOPER'S NOVELS AND TALES. 
 
 FORTY VOLUlAlES BOUND IN TWENTY. 
 
 CONTAINING 
 The Spy, Pioneers, Pilot, Lionel Lincoln, The Prairie, Water TVitch, Wish-ton^ 
 
 wish. Last of The Mohicans, Red Rover, Bravo, Travellins; Bachelor, Heidenmauer, 
 
 Headsman, Monnikins, Precaution, Homeward Bound, Home as Found, Pathfinder, 
 
 Mercedes of Castile, and The Deerslayer, 
 
 " Also, the Second Series of his Novels and Tales, containing the last fourteen 
 volumes of his books, bound in a style to match the first series in twenty-six 
 volumes. 
 
 The whole of the Novels by Mr. Cooper are now for the first time brought within 
 the reach of the public in a uniform style, and at so low a price as to claim for them 
 a very general circulation."
 
 11 
 STANLEY THORN. 
 
 BY HENRY COCKTON, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "VALENTINE VOX, THE VENTRILOQUIST," &C. 
 
 WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 DESIGNED BY CRUIKSHANK, LEECH, &C. AND ENGRAVED BY YEAGER. 
 
 In one royal octavo vohcine, bound in embossed cloth. 
 
 "Who has not roared with laughter over tlie admirably recorded and most humor- 
 ously conceived adventures of "Valentine'?" Many of our contemporaries have 
 teemed with his rare " tricks" and side-splitting encounters. We need only say that 
 Stanley is worthy of the author of Valentine. Henry Cockton is destined to fill a 
 high station as a writer of pleasant fiction, and he has already proved himself, with 
 perhaps a single exception, the most successful rival of the great and inimitable 
 Boz." — Saturday Courier. 
 
 " In making a withering expose of the nefarious and plundering schemes by ■which 
 young men of fortune are surrounded and entrapped, it is extraordinary with what 
 consummate art the author of the new story of Modern Life, ' Stanley Thorn,' has 
 preserved a lofty and moral tone in the delineations he has been compelled to make. 
 The effects of his pictures of bacchanalian revelries, gaming-houses atrocities, mas- 
 querade dissipations, turf villanies, bribery at elections, fraudulent money-raising, 
 &c., leave on the mind of the reader not only astonishments that such things should 
 be, but a hearty abhorrence of them; and a determination to make the disclosures 
 available as beacons. 'Stanley Thorn' will probably be the most popular work of 
 fiction of the day." — Beniley's Miscellany. 
 
 GUY FAWKES; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE GUNPOWDER TREASON. 
 
 AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE. 
 BY WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE TOWER OF LONDON," "JACK SHEPPARD," &C. 
 
 In 1 volume, 8vo. toith Plates. 
 
 " We look upon ' Guy Fawkes' as, in many respects, the author's best production. 
 The incidents of the story, and the situations of the chief actors in it, are such as 
 enable a writer possessed of his peculiar powers, to turn them to the best possible 
 account. Deeply read in the history of the time, versed in antiquarian lore, and 
 familiar with details and localities, he adds to these qualifications a quick suscepti- 
 bility of the nature of effect, and the power of grouping his figures so as to bring 
 them at once into immediate action, — attributes which are eminently serviceable in a 
 narrative like the present. In his happiest efforts we are often reminded of the 
 free and vigorous pencil of the Wouvermans. In seeking a romance of stirring 
 character and intense interest, the reader will assuredly not be disappointed." — 
 Mornirnr Herald. 
 
 THE PORCEI-ASN TOWER; 
 
 NINE STORIES OF CHINA. 
 
 COMPILED FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 BY " T. T. T." 
 
 WITH HUMOROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 In one volume. 
 
 " Full of all sorts of fun, wit, humour, and pictorial drollery combined; and illus- 
 trated as it is with true congenial spirit, by Leech, the rising artist of the day, we 
 may safely recommend it to all." — Globe. 
 
 " Replete with arch drollery, and illustrated in a kindred spirit by Leech, A 
 more humorous or entertaining little volume has not appeared this season." — Sun, 
 
 " A very humorous and amusing volume. The illustrations are exceedingly co- 
 mic." — Morning Herald.
 
 12 
 
 BARNABY RUDCE, 
 
 WITH 
 
 XSAVrTT BEATTTIFUI. IXiXfUSTRATZOXTS, 
 
 ENGRAVED BY YEAGER, 
 
 TOGETHER 
 WITH OVER FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS ON WOOD. 
 
 Ill one handsome royal 8vo. volume. 
 
 A NEW EDITION OF 
 
 the: old cuRios£Tir shop. 
 
 WITH MANY ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS, 
 
 Engraved by Veager,from Designs by Sibson; 
 
 And printed on cream-coloured paper to match the other works of "Boz." 
 This edition contains upwards of One Hundred Illustrations. 
 
 POSTHiMCUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB. 
 OLIVER TWIST; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE PARISH BOY'S PROGRESS, 
 
 With a new Preface. 
 
 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES 
 
 OF 
 
 NICHOLAS NICKLiSB^r 
 
 SKETCHES 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE OF 
 
 EVERY-DAY Z.IFE AKTD EVERY-DAY PEOPLE. 
 
 All the above works are printed on fine paper, with illustrations, and handsomely 
 bound in embossed cloth, to match. 
 
 The additional illustrations to the " Old Curiosity Shop," engraved by Yeager, 
 from designs by Sibson, may be had separate, neatly done up in a printed cover. 
 
 Cheap editions of these works, without plates, are also published by L. & B., and 
 can be had of all booksellers. 
 
 TALES AND SOUVENIRS OF A 
 
 B.ESID^NC£2 IN iEUKOPU. 
 
 BY THE LADY OF A DISTINGUISHED SENATOR OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 In one handsome royal volume, bound in extra embossed cloth. 
 " The authoress of this very agreeable volume is said to be the accomplished wife 
 of a distinguished Senator, whose residence abroad, for a number of years, in a high 
 diplomatic station, afforded opportunity for the " Souvenirs," which are now grace- 
 fully presented to the public, and which will place the fair gleaner by the side of 
 those of her own sex in this country who have, by their writings, vindicated their 
 claims to a high rank in the scale of genius and practical talent. The contents of 
 this handsome little volume are Fragments of a Journal, a Ballad, and Tales, just 
 in sufficient variety to give evidence of much diversity of talent, with very consider- 
 able power, which we hope to see employed again and again in the production of 
 •Works like this, which will long be an ornament to the polite literature of our coun- 
 try." — Madisonian,
 
 1 
 
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