authorities themselves would accept it. The actual establishment of the United States blockade, as I have taken pains to show in the pamphlet already referred to, did not occur at any point on the American coast till April 30, and in the great cotton ports of New Orleans and Mobile not till nearly a month later-May 28 and May 27.

Now, to turn the discussion to the reputation of a less important personage than the late British foreign secretary, will it be credited-not of Earl Russell, (about whom I can only speak inferentially as to his recurrence to the Blue Book of 1861, and his discovery therein of the memorandum "Received May 14,") but of Historicus-that he had just been all over these parliamentary papers of 1861 and was largely citing from them, when he was making the assertion that "the very terms of the proclamation of blockade were published in the Times of May 4;" and adding that Lord Hobart was "outSewarding Seward," in contending that the British government did not have actual notice of the American proclamation in advance of their own declaration of neutrality Says Historicus in his article of January 21, (Times, 23:)

"On April 19 the President of the United States signed a proclamation of blockade. This was communicated officially by Mr. Seward to Lord Lyons on April (twenty-seventh) 27. [The italics are mine.] On that day a further proclamation was issued. On the 29th Lord Lyons had an interview with Mr. Seward, &c. On May 4, 1861, Lord Lyons writes to Lord Russell," &c. [The letter in which Mr. Seward speaks of "public law," "neutrals," "belligerent," of which Historicus makes so much account.]

All these dates and dispatches here referred to (and many more cited by Historicus might be added to the quotation) show the result of a careful study on his part of the Blue Book, which I have heretofore spoken of as having so unfortunately escaped my own attention. But who can doubt that the student who had discovered that the American blockade "was officially communicated by Mr. Seward to Lord Lyons April twenty-seventh," had also discovered that the same official communication (as by the memorandum on that very dispatch) had been "received" at the Foreign Office" May fourteenth ?" And yet this punctilious upholder of "his own accuracy and fair dealing" is attempting, two days later, to convince the world in general and Lord Hobart in particular, that there is no difference in law between a blockade notification communicated with all the formalities belonging to that highly technical procedure under the law of nations, and such a newspaper transcript as the Times's reprint of May 4; and no difference in fact between the dates of May 3 and May 14, though he is well aware that the question of precipitate and unfriendly intervention in American affairs, constituting a national grievance and thought to be worthy of international arbitration, largely turns on the Importance of those respective dates in regard to British action.

I will do Historicus the justice, however, to admit that I am fully aware that he defends belligerent recognition upon grounds ignoring the materiality of all dates whatsoever connected with it in the view, namely, that there was war in the United States when President Lincoln's proclamation was in type, and almost before the ink was dry. To that I have to reply, in the first place, that the British government itself has never taken any such visionary and absurd position. On the contrary, it has done its best to set agoing the after-thought that the Crown lawyers had the United States proclamation before them for legal consideration when they advised, prior to May 6, 1861; that the proclamation not only justified but necessitated the British declaration of neutrality; an after-thought, afterward improved upon by Lord Russell, under date of August 30, 1865, when he informed Mr. Adams at that time that if the British government had not a legal notification of the blockade prior to May 13, 1861, they had at any rate a complete newspaper copy of it. A second answer to Historicus's visionary vagary might well be that according to one of the first principles of international law, as codified in the declaration of Paris, "blockades to be binding must be effective.” Pray, was there any effective blockade of Chesapeake Bay, much less of New Orleans, when Abraham Lincoln had affixed his signature to the proclamation of April 19, 1861 ? But I will not pursue this point as worthy of serious notice. I will only add that it is quite an advance upon Historicus's other position, that when intelligence of a blockade proclamation is actually received by the British Foreign Office, it makes no difference whether it comes from the miscellaneous news and small-item department of the Times, or comes officially verified by the great seal of a sovereign power in the regular course of national communications.

I sum up in brief what I hope are the conclusions established by this paper:

1. That if the American proclamation of blockade is invoked as the justifying excuse for British neutrality, it will be found that the British government made such haste to recognize rebel belligerency that it announced its determination to take that step eight days, at least, before being officially notified that any American blockade was intended, much less that one was actually set on foot.

2. That at the date of such announcement, viz, May 6, 1861, all that that government knew of the terms of the American proclamation was embraced in a newspaper paragraph or telegraphic summary, which omitted any mention of " prize," "piracy," or the other so-called belligerent characteristics of the genuine document, and which, besides,

contained some twenty other errors of addition and variation, as well substantial as verbal.

3. That the formal publication of the British proclamation of neutrality of May 13, 1861, was hurried out twenty-four hours in advance of the official receipt of President Lincoln's first blockade proclamation, and that, too, when the British government had been informed that the customary diplomatic communication of the American manifesto might at any moment be expected.

4. That the British foreign secretary, as well as the British prime minister, afterward attempted an unfounded apology for this precipitancy, when, in the spring of 1865, they set up the pretense that British neutrality was the natural and unavoidable consequence of the prior announcement by the United States of their purposed blockade, and when, as Earl Russell even asserted, the Crown lawyers based their opinion of the existence of a state of war on the fact of that announcement.

5. That Earl Russell, down to as late a day as August 30, 1865, and after that apology had been questioned, sought to give currency to the same sort of justification, when he quoted the receipt of a more perfect newspaper transcript of the President's proclamation at the British foreign office, as and for the just equivalent of an official communication of that document to the British government.

6. That when Historicus, in reviving Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston's afterthought and seeking to give it new currency, is charging Lord Hobart with "out-Sewarding Seward," he is himself all the while aware that Mr. Seward, in the letter of January 12, 1867, to which Historicus refers, has made an accidentally mistaken allusion to the date of May 3, 1861, in confounding the telegraphic publications of the American blockade in the English newspapers of that day with its subsequent official communications to the British government, eleven days later, (a matter probably of clerical inaccuracy, inasmuch as close in connection with it appear errata both of the dates of Mr. Seward's own proclamation of blockade and of the date of the issue of the British proclamation of neutrality, one of which Historicus himself corrects as a misprint;) and yet Historicus, well knowing that Lord Hobart is in the right, and he himself in the wrong, about the date at which the British government had adequate official knowledge of the American proclamation, is trying to overwhelm his opponent by citing the statement of the American Secretary of State as triumphantly sustaining his own perversion of the historical fact as disclosed by the parliamentary Blue Book.

7. That if Historicus "justifies his own reputation for accuracy and fair dealing"which he asserts is the motive of his latest communication-by the process last hinted at, he certainly does not advance that reputation, in either particular, by asserting that "the very terms of the proclamation of blockade of April 19, 1861, were published in the Times of May 4, 1861."

8. That Historicus ought to invite Earl Russell to lend his great diplomatic name to a joint editing with himself of a new treatise on public law, in which should be treated, under distinctive heads, "Blockades," "Paper Blockades," and "Newspaper Blockades."

In reading over this summing-up I fear that I may have done Historicus injustice in assuming so strongly as I have that he must have been aware of the date at which the official notification of the American blockade reached the British Foreign Office. It may be quite possible, after all, that, though he had ransacked the Blue Book of 1861, (containing that and other documents,) he had not happened to cast his eye at the date of the reception in London of Lord Lyons's dispatch of April 27, and that my discovery of the indorsement upon it, "Received May 14," is as much a piece of news to him as it is to my readers generally. If so, I shall gladly learn that when he was replying to Lord Hobart, under date of January 24, he was doing so without any suspicion that he himself was keeping back that important memorandum in the history of our late rebellion. I am free to say, also, that I suppose his quotation of the Times's summary of the proclamation was a case of a rash taking upon trust, instead of a designed misrepresentation of the facts. Such an awkward mistake, however, one would think, ought to serve as a salutary caution to him against future rashnesses of the same sort.

Personally, I can only regret that Mr. Harcourt throws himself open to such suspicions of inadequate accuracy and pains-taking as a writer on public law. For one, I must own to deriving great personal pleasure, as well as profit, from his publications; and I believe I speak no more than the truth when I add that I think the United States government and people are under great obligations to him for his advocacy of just and high-minded measures of international dealing toward this country at various periods of the late civil struggle-greater, perhaps, than to almost any other European writer who has undertaken to discuss our foreign relations.

Of Earl Russell, also-a much more important personage to us in our contest with the confederate rebels, from his high official position, than the publicist just named-I cannot forbear to say a word of more kindly comment than my previous criticisms would imply. If Americans must long remember the sharpness of his lordship's diplomatic and parliamentary expressions, they must also gratefully bear in mind his importLat and substantial friendliness toward the United States in more than one particular;

his indulgent respect of our blockade at a time when its "binding effectiveness" might have been questioned; his steadfast refusal to join the French Emperor in full recognition of confederate independence; and his uniformly kind and friendly treatment of our representative at the British court throughout the dark days of our national discredit with Englishmen generally. Nor will Americans soon forget his lordship's magnanimous and candid confession at the Garrison banquet of the wrong he had done President Lincoln in questioning the sincerity of his motives in issuing the emancipation proclamation. Such a confession almost marks a new era in the practice of professed diplomatists.

În bringing to a close this extended communication, I must deprecate the conclusion that it embraces all that can be said on the merits of "Hasty recognition of rebel belligerency and our right to complain of it." No one can regret more than I do that I have been obliged to occupy so much space in the development of a single point. But that is a point on which I have followed, where Historicus and (I believe I may say) Lord Russell have led the way in challenging discussion. They have tried to conclude "our right to complain" with this plea in bar, that Great Britain took no step in the American struggle till the United States proclamation of blockade had set her in motion and compelled her to declare us belligerents and herself a neutral. I trust that that plea has now been taken out of the way of a fair hearing on the merits of our grievances. Of those merits I cannot forbear to add that I hope in some other connection to show that the British pretense of being compelled to declare neutrality in our civil struggle in order to protect British commerce and to secure the rights of neutrals is mere trumpery; that, so far from President Lincoln's proclamation being a war measure, it was eminently a peace measure, intended not merely to be municipal, but also to be only temporary in its duration-to last, in its own phrase, "until Congress shall have assembled and deliberated on the said unlawful proceedings;" that no government could have been more surprised than were the United States at its proclamation of blockade being afterward (for it was not at the time) perverted into a pretense of a public war by England and France; that such a blockade as was that of the United States of their insurrectionary districts is no ground for foreign intervention under the law of nations; that if afterward there grew up within our borders a great civil war on land, there never were the elements of rebel belligerency on the sea; that, as Jefferson Davis's letters of marque and reprisal never came to anything-even with British and French suspension of the first point of the declaration of Paris in their favor, so as to give free scope to rebel privateers-so down to the end of the struggle the confederate navy proper every day "grew small," and, if possible, "beautifully less;" that British and French recognition of belligerency had for its object, if not the direct encouragement of rebel privateering, yet the taking a step onward in the direction of full recognition of rebel independence; and that finally, when the history of that recognition comes to be fully and fairly developed, it will be found to be, not a hasty recognition of rebel belligerency, but a prepared and persistent recognition of rebel equality; and such a precedent, to be deprecated and disavowed politically and governmentally, as the Alabama precedent has now begun to be by Englishmen themselves, as a precedent of neutrality, legally and juridically.

BOSTON, February 28.

GEORGE BEMIS.

APPENDIX No. III.

ARTICLE OF "HISTORICUS," FROM THE LONDON TIMES OF JANUARY 11, 1865, ON "CONFEDERATE MENACES AGAINST NEUTRAL RIGHTS."*

[From the London Times of January 11, 1865.]

CONFEDERATE MENACES AGAINST NEUTRAL RIGHTS.

To the Editor of the Times:

SIR: The history of nations records every variety of attempt on the part of belligerents to break in upon those principles of public law which constitute the sole restraint on their passions and their interests. Nevertheless, I doubt if there can anywhere be found an instance in which any community pretending to the character of a civilized people has ventured upon so open a defiance of justice and of right as that which is Hung down to the whole world of neutral nations in a document recently put forth by the confederate government. There is certainly nothing worse to be found even in the insane decrees of the French convention against neutral rights. This confederate paper is so incredibly insolent in its tone, and so extravagantly foolish in its pretensions, that, but for the fact that it is published "by authority" in the Index, (the avowed organ of the confederate government in this country,) I should certainly have taken it for granted that it had been one of those clumsy forgeries which from time to time issue from the American press. However, finding it vouched by such authority, I am bound to accept it as the genuine production of Mr. Benjamin, the confederate secretary of state, and to deal with it as such.

This astonishing performance professes to be a dispatch from the secretary of state at Richmond to the confederate secretary of the navy, containing instructions as to the treatment of neutral vessels by confederate cruisers. The origin of the paper is shortly this: It appears that the English Vice-Admiral Hope had called the attention of the captain of the Florida to the fact that the Martaban, a vessel with a British register and papers, had been burnt at sea by the Alabama. The vice-admiral, in a letter certainly not very happily worded, to which I shall presently revert, informed the captain of the Florida of the course he should adopt if such acts were repeated. It cannot be necessary to remind your readers, who are familiar with the recent discussions in the case of the Trent, that for a belligerent forcibly to deal with and dispose of neutral property without a regular adjudication in a prize court, is one of the gravest offenses which can be committed by a belligerent against a neutral nation. Neutrals are only induced to tolerate the exercise, at all times irksome, of belligerent rights by the security which the law of nations has guaranteed to them in the impartial and judicial decisions of a prize court. If this guarantee is violated and this security is removed there is no longer any protection for neutrals, and therefore no longer any prospect of peace. A belligerent cruiser who destroys property prima facie neutral without adjudication is guilty of an act which in its character is piracy and in its result is war. Of all the doctrines of the law of nations this is the most fundamental and the least disputed.

The right of the neutral to adjudication before a competent court is an indefeasible right of which no condition of circumstances can be allowed to deprive him; and yet it is this law which the confederate government have publicly announced that they intend to violate and set at naught. It is one thing for a government to be committed by the rash and inconsiderate acts of its military or naval officers; the mischief thus created is sometimes difficult enough to repair; but it is another and much more serious thing when offenses of this kind are the result of instructions authoritatively issued by the government itself; and it is to the latter category that the threatened outrages on neutral rights by the confederate cruisers unhappily belong. In dealing with the federal complaints against Great Britain on account of the acknowledgment of the belligerency of the South I have on former occasions pointed out that the fact of the confederate government possessing no ports into which it could carry its prizes for condemnation afforded no ground for refusing to it the rights of a maritime belligerent. I have further remarked that the consequence of this situation of the South

See dispatch No. 854, from Mr. Adams to Mr. Seward, January 12, 1865, Vol. I, p. 613.

was one which no doubt gave to the North the benefit of its maritime superiority, for the South, having no ports, could make no captures upon neutral property, which can only be dealt with by the adjudication of a prize court. This is what the North gains and the South loses by the maritime inferiority of the latter. But it should seem that, while the North are dissatisfied with the advantage which the law of nations thus allots to them, the South are resolved not to endure the loss which the same law imposes upon them. They, unfortunately for themselves, are too weak to command a port into which they can conduct their prizes for adjudication, and therefore they propose to get rid of the difficulty by the simple method of declaring that they intend to dispense with adjudication altogether. That is to say, if it is difficult or inconvenient for you to carry a man presumably innocent to a place where he can be tried, you may lawfully hang him at once without any trial at all. This is the doctrine which the new candidate for a place among the society of nations proposes to introduce into the code of public law.

The pretext by which the confederate secretary pretends to justify these monstrous instructions is as ill-founded as the course of conduct they prescribe is indefensible. He makes a grievance of the fact that the neutral powers have prohibited either belligerent from bringing their prizes into the neutral harbors for the purpose of condemnation and sale. Now, there is no right more clearly declared by all writers to be inherent in a neutral government than that of the prohibiting the introduction of prizes for sale into its ports. Some of the best writers hold, indeed, that such a prohibition is an essential duty of neutrality, but none deny that such a course is permissible and proper. England and France have both adopted this rule in the present war. And, as far as I know, the same course has been pursued by all other civilized nations, otherwise the confederates would exercise in the ports of such. nations as permitted them the privileges which they complain are denied to them elsewhere. But if to deny the entry of prizes into its ports is-as it unquestionably is-the right of a nentral government, then such a government is not to be told that because it thinks fit to exercise one right it shall therefore be deprived of another. It is no answer to the inalienable right which a neutral has to have captures made upon it adjudicated in a prize court that the captor is unable to find a port into which to carry the prize for adjudication. The only consequence of such a state of things is that the captor must abstain from neutral captures which he is unable legitimately to effect. On this point, if any authority on such a subject were wanting, that of Lord Stowell is expressed: "When it is doubtful whether the capture is enemy's property, and it is impossible to bring it in, the safe and proper course is to dismiss. When it is neutral, the act of destruction cannot be justified by the gravest importance of such an act to the captor's own state.”– The Felicity, 2 Dods., p. 386.

If these doctrines had been mere speculative menaces, we might have been disposed to disregard them as a part of that idle rhodomontade to which the American politician is so incurably prone; but unfortunately in this case they have taken the very practical and dangerous form of a "minute of instructions" to the confederate naval officers, introduced by the following solemn paragraph in the secretary of state's dispatch:

"The purpose of the President in requesting that the papers should be referred to this department was to obtain for the guidance of the naval officers in command of our cruisers such further and fuller instructions for the discharge of their duties as the experience of the war has shown to be necessary. These instructions I have now the honor to forward to you for transmission to your subordinates.

"MINUTE OF INSTRUCTIONS.

"The cases which occur for decision by our cruisers may be classified as follows." The following are the classes in which neutral rights are involved:

"B. A vessel under enemy's flag, with cargo wholly or in part belonging to neutrals. "C. A vessel really neutral, with cargo wholly or in part belonging to the enemy. "D. A vessel ostensibly neutral, but really hostile, fraudulently placed under a neutral flag and furnished with fraudulent papers as a cover to protect her from capture."

Let us see how Mr. Benjamin instructs the confederate cruisers to deal with these several cases. Beginning with class B, he says:

"B. A vessel under enemy's flag, with cargo wholly or in part belonging to neutrals. "Under ordinary circumstances this case would present no embarrassment. The captured would be taken into a port of the captors, or of a neutral country; the portion of the cargo belonging to the neutrals would be delivered to the owners, and the vessel, with such portion of the cargo as belonged to the enemy, would be condemned as prize.

"The action of neutral governments has placed serious obstacles in the way of doing justice to their own people. They have closed their ports to the admission of captured vessels, and have thus rendered it impossible to make delivery in their own ports of the property of their own subjects found on board of the vessels of our enemies, while