marginal abstract of that case, in one section, as will be remembered, was: "But our courts of admiralty will take jurisdiction to inquire if the alleged wrongdoer is duly commissioned, or has, by the use of our territory to increase his force, trespassed on our neutral rights." And since Judge Story has been vouched in so repeatedly for what is put forth for the opposite doctrine, by the Attorney-General, we desire to call Sir Roundell's attention to some other cases in which that highly coveted authority has unmistakably defined his position. as to this point.

In the first place, we would respectfully inquire of the Attorney-General, if he has omitted to notice that Mr. Justice Story made one of the court, which at the same term and the day after the decision of the Santissima Trinidad, decided also The Gran Para (7 Wheat. 471)?-He will remember the case, by the now familiar citation from Chief Justice Marshall's opinion, ending thus: "this would indeed be a fraudulent neutrality, disgraceful to our own government," &c., the fraudulent neutrality, that was to say, of allowing itself to be cheated out of administering international justice, by a bogus commission. Does that case, we would ask, look much as if Judge Story would have dropped the jurisdiction of the Georgia, if he had had her to dispose of judicially, the moment that it was intimated to him that she was a public commissioned vessel?

At the same February term of the Supreme Court, 1822, with the Santissima Trinidad decision, was also the decision of the cases of The Monte Allegre and The Rainha de los Anjos (7 Wheat. 520), participated in by Judge Story, in which the court threw aside another of these pseudo-commissions to enforce the provisions of the American neutral statute. In February, 1823, it was Mr. Justice Story (in The Experiment, 8 Wheat. 261), speaking for the whole court, who disposed of another of these same commissions by pronouncing it invalid, as obtained by deception toward the granting power; and, finally, not to multiply cases, it was Mr. Justice Story, at the same February term of the court, 1823, on behalf of the full bench, who took away from a privateer, illegally

equipped within our jurisdiction, a Spanish public ship of war, which the privateer, after capturing, had converted into another privateer, and had sent back into our ports fortified with a Venezuelan commission, which commission she defied the American court to interfere with. (The Nereyda, 8 Wheat. already cited.)

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As this case indirectly hits another of Sir Roundell's pet propositions, that he can find no instance in which a prize, converted into a ship of war, has been excluded from our ports," we briefly cite its leading facts: The Spanish warship, the Nereyda, had been captured by the privateer, the Irresistible-doubtless the same Buenos-Ayrean buccaneer that figures as the capturer of the Gran Para, and by whose pretended commission Chief Justice Marshall thought it would be disgraceful for our government to be hoodwinked.1 This time the Irresistible came before the court under the colors of the "Oriental Republic." She had fought and captured the Nereyda on the high seas, and having carried her prize into an allied port of a South American republic, had had her condemned in a so-called prize-court as capture of war, and sold at public auction. The prize-vessel, the Nereyda, had next adopted a Venezuelan commission, and afterwards ventured into Baltimore under the Venezuelan flag. The Spanish consul having detected his master's ship of war in the disguised privateer, libelled her on behalf of the Spanish crown, alleging that her capturer, the Irresistible, had violated the neutral laws of the United States by an illegal original outfit in an American port. The Supreme Court (Mr. J. Story giving the opinion), notwithstanding the show of the Venezuelan condemnation-in-admiralty and the Venezuelan commission as a privateer, and notwithstanding that the capture had been made on the high seas, restored her to the possession of the king of Spain, on admission of the original violation of the American law by the outfit of the Irresistible.

1 The Attorney-General will find that this vessel was proceeded against for a forfeiture under the United States temporary Neutrality Act of 1817, ch. 58, in 7 Wheat. Rep. p. 551. She escaped punishment by the expiration of the statute under its own limitation, before final adjudication.

After reading this case, if his attention has not before been called to it, the Attorney-General, we fancy, will say less of Judge Story's high regard for commissions to belligerent ships of war. He will probably think less also of the doctrine of a commission's always superseding the necessity of a bill of sale, in the case of a public ship of war; the only point to which Judge Story intended that his long dictum, beginning "in general the commission of a public ship . . . is complete proof of her public character," should apply.

No doubt the doctrine is true, "in general," as the learned judge lays it down, that a commission, duly authenticated, is evidence enough of nationality, without a bill of sale or other usual documentary papers of a private-owned ship. But if Sir Roundell Palmer will examine the cases adduced, and numerous others which can be instanced, he will find that the whole court, in general, and Judge Story more especially, in particular, time and again, when inquiring into the antecedents of suspicious belligerents, regularly brought before them for adjudication, have set aside commissions, as well where there were bills of sale as where there were none, when satisfied that such commissions were fictitious and collusive. The Independencia, for a rarity, happened to be able to show a bona fide commission, and to establish a changed nationality.

We do not propose at present to go into the other famous dictum of Judge Story's in this Santissima Trinidad case, about there being "nothing in our laws to forbid our citizens from sending armed vessels to foreign ports for sale," &c., which the Attorney-General does not cite. We suppose that the most captious critics of American neutrality among our English friends will admit that there can be such a thing as a bona fide transfer of a ship of war by neutrals to a belligerent; or if they cannot admit as much, we ask them how they hold upon the conduct of their own government in selling the Victor, alias the Rappahannock, to the Confederates? When Judge Story, then, was talking about "a commercial adventure," &c., we will only ask for so much charity on his behalf, as to have it believed that he had in mind a transaction of at

least as fair and above-board a character as that of the British transfer alluded to.

We drop the Santissima Trinidad case here; believing that it will hardly be thought worth the Attorney-General's citing again, when he has to advocate another Georgia reception, and hoping that if the favorers of the Lairds and the Millers of England think that they can make capital out of any of the dicta of Judge Story's contained in it, they will remember that that eminent and patriotic. publicist has put himself too much at large upon the record of public law, to be set wrong by what can be misapplied from his readings in this single

case.

3*

IV.

JUDGE STORY'S DICTUM IN THE AMISTAD DE RUES CASE. - SUMMARY OF AMERICAN AUTHORITY.

THERE is one more citation from Judge Story in Sir Roundell Palmer's speech, namely, that from the case of La Amistad de Rues (5 Wheat. 385), which we feel constrained to notice. It is after the Attorney-General has got upon the Alabama case, and is trying to lay the ghost of the Governmental offence in that matter. He is able to find thus much in Judge Story's opinion in the Amistad de Rues case, which he thinks helps him out in his official task of justifying his Government for continuing to extend the hospitality of British harbors to the Alabama, and for refusing to make compensation for her past depredations upon American commerce :

"Mr. Justice Story thus lays down what is the limit of the obligation which the neutral owes to the belligerent in this matter:-'When called upon by either of the belligerents to act in such cases, all that justice seems to require is, that the neutral nation should fairly execute its own laws, and give no asylum to the property unjustly captured. It is bound, therefore, to restore the property if found within its own ports; but, beyond this, it is not obliged to interfere between the belligerents.'"

On which the Attorney-General remarks (inter alia): “Hc [J. Story] does not say that an asylum may not be given to public ships of war, whatever their public history. . . . The authority of Mr. Justice Story, therefore, distinctly excludes the proposition that belligerents have any rights entitling them to require interference by the neutral, to the extent of excluding absolutely from her ports ships of this description, if it does not seem to the neutral, herself, necessary so to do. I say, then, we have done all that authority requires us to do."