"The inferences drawn from the investigation of the Act by counsel were put in the following form by my solicitor:—
"'1. It is no offense (under the Act) for British subjects to equip, etc., a ship at some country without Her Majesty's dominions though the intent be to cruise against a friendly State.
"'2. It is no offense for any person (subject or no subject) to equip a ship within Her Majesty's dominions if it be not done with the intent to cruise against a friendly State.
"'3. The mere building of a ship within Her Majesty's dominions by any person (subject or no subject) is no offense, whatever may be the intent of the parties, because the offense is not in the building, but the equipping.
"'Therefore any ship-builder may build any ship in Her Majesty's dominions, provided he does not equip her within Her Majesty's dominions, and he had nothing to do with the acts of the purchasers done within Her Majesty's dominions without his concurrence, or without Her Majesty's dominions even with his concurrence.'"— [BULLOCK's Secret Service of the Confederate States, vol. i, pp. 65-67.]
It is an amazing courtesy which attributes to the eminent counsel a complete ignorance of the object and purpose for which their weighty opinion was sought in the construction of British law. Such ignorance is feigned and not real, and the pretense of its existence indicates either on the part of the author or the counsel a full appreciation of the deadly consequences of that malign interpretation of England's duty for which two illustrious members of the English Bar were willing to stand sponsors before the world. Conceding, as we fairly may concede, that the decision in the case of the Alexandra is confirmatory of the opinion given by these leaders of the British bar, the result was simply the establishment and administration of the Naval Department of the Confederacy in England. There was its chief, there were its financial agents, there its workshops. There were its vessels armed and commissioned. Thence they sailed on their mission of destruction, and thither they returned to repair their damages, and to renew their supplies. Under formal contracts with the Confederate Government the colonial ports of Nassau and the Bermudas were made depots of supplies which were drawn upon with persistent and successful regularity. The effects of this thoroughly organized system of so-called neutrality that supplied ports, ships, arms, and men to a belligerent which had none, are not matters of conjecture or exaggeration; they have been proven and recorded. In three years fifteen million dollars' worth of property was destroyed,—given to the flame or sunk beneath the waters,—the shipping of the United States was reduced one- half, and the commercial flag of the Union fluttered with terror in every wind that blew, form the whale-fisheries of the Arctic to the Southern Cross.
MINISTER DAYTON'S INDIGNANT PROTEST.
With this condition of affairs, permitted and encouraged by England and France, our distinguished minister at Paris was justified in saying to the Government of Louis Napoleon on the reception of the Confederate steamer Georgia at Brest, in language which though but the bare recital of fact was of itself the keenest reproach to the French Government:—
"The Georgia, like the Florida, the Alabama, and other scourges of peaceful commerce, was born of that unhappy decree which gave the rebels who did not own a ship-of-war or command a single port the right of an ocean belligerent. Thus encouraged by foreign powers they began to build and fit out in neutral ports a class of vessels constructed mainly for speed, and whose acknowledged mission is not to fight, but to rob, to burn, and to fly. Although the smoke of burning ships has everywhere marked the track of the Georgia and the Florida upon the ocean, they have never sought a foe or fired a gun against an armed enemy. To dignify such vessels with the name of ships-of-war seems to me, with deference, a misnomer. Whatever flag may fly from their mast-head, or whatever power may claim to own them, their conduct stamps them as piratical. If vessels of war even, they would by this conduct have justly forfeited all courtesies in ports of neutral nations. Manned by foreign seamen, armed by foreign guns, entering no home port, and waiting no judicial condemnation of prizes, they have already devastated and destroyed our commerce to an extent, as compared with their number, beyond any thing known in the records of privateering."
It would seem impossible that such a state of things could be the result of the impartial administration of an honest neutrality. It must be attributed to one of two causes;—either the municipal law of foreign countries was not sufficient to enable the governments to control the selfishness or the sentiment of their people,—to which the reply is obvious that the weakness and incompetence of municipal law cannot diminish or excuse international obligations: or it must have been due to a misconception of the obligations which international law imposes. How far there may have been a motive for this misconception, how far the wish was father to the thought of such misconstruction, it is perhaps needless now to inquire. The theory of international law maintained by the foreign Powers may be fairly stated in two propositions:—