CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



203 



frnstrated. because it is a well-understood prin- 

 ciple of public law that prevails in all civilized 

 nations that where a state of war exists be- 

 tween two parties, it is lawful, it is the very 

 object of war, that each party shall be made to 

 Batter in the persons and in the property of its 

 respective subjects or citizens. So, then, the 

 destruction of these ships and vessels of ours, 

 in respect to which we have obtained this 

 money in a greater or less degree, was a de- 

 struction, not by her Majesty's forces, not by 

 the acddeatBof warfare, not. by a warfare car- 

 ried on by Great Britain against some other 

 power, we occupying the attitude of a neutral, 

 but it was accomplished by the belligerent 

 exercise of the lawful forces of war, in the 

 public sense in which I am now speaking, of a 

 belligerent recognized by all the nations of the 

 world. 



"The result of that is, of course, that no citi- 

 zen of the United States had any claim upon 

 anybody, either his own Government or the 

 Confederate government or the Government 

 of Great Britain, in respect to any indemnity 

 whatever, for the Government of her Majesty, 

 so far as she was responsible at all, was respon- 

 sible only as an accessory to an act which she 

 did not commit, but which she aided another 

 belligerent to commit by supplying that bel- 

 ligerent with munitions of war and with the 

 nugmentation of force occurring in her ports. 

 The whole injury, therefore, that was commit- 

 ted by the Confederates through the accession 

 and assistance of her Majesty's subjects was a 

 national injury, because, as I have shown and 

 as all people agree, between two belligerents 

 every injury that is inflicted upon the people 

 of the other side is a national injury in respect 

 to which neither the citizen nor any person for 

 him is entitled to any redress at all. He is 

 like the soldier in the skirmish line, or leading 

 the forlorn hope in a storming party ; he hap- 

 pens to be merely the more exposed point of 

 the national body proper that happens to re- 

 ceive the blow, and he only receives it as one 

 component part of the whole nation, and the 

 whole nation suffers accordingly. 



'* It is thus obvious, Mr. President, that her 

 Majesty's Government committed no wrong in 

 the personal sense against any citizen of the 

 United States. She did not even issue any 

 'rdi-rs whatever for seizure or reprisal or cap- 

 ture. She only, by her negligence or by her 

 sympathy with the rebellion and it is not 

 necessary to decide which suffered her sub- 

 jects to be accessories, in the way of furnish- 

 ing id and munitions to a belligerent to aug- 

 ment the power that that belligerent had to 

 wage war upon us. I suppose nobody will 

 dispute that proposition ; and therefore it is 

 that this case differs from the ordinary cases 

 between neutral powers where undertaking to 

 exercise rights on their own account the citizens 

 of other neutral nations have suffered injury, 

 an injury which from its very nature they 

 would be entitled but for certain principles of 



public policy to maintain an action for in the 

 courts of the country that committed the in- 

 jury. But in this case the injury, as it re- 

 spected the Lairds if you please, who built 

 some of the vessels for the depredations of 

 which an award was made, is so very remote, 

 so much more remote than the consequential 

 injuries of ours which were disallowed, that 

 no court, no statesman, no philosopher, no 

 writer, would think of saying that an American 

 citizen could have any claim upon the Lairds 

 because they had built a vessel that augmented 

 the force of the Confederacy, and that that 

 force of the Confederacy was afterward exerted 

 upon the property of the particular claimant. 

 That would be out of the question. 



" Then, as I say, Mr. President, the privity, 

 as the lawyers would call it, the relation be- 

 tween the Government of Great Britain and 

 the citizens of the United States whose prop- 

 erty was destroyed by a Confederate cruiser, 

 and that Confederate cruiser had been enabled 

 to destroy that property from the fact that it 

 had received a general augmentation of its 

 force, not to prey upon that particular ship of 

 our citizen, but to prey upon the commerce of 

 the United States generally, is not such as 

 either philosophy or law can recognize as 

 creating a responsibility on the part of her 

 Majesty's Government to any citizen of the 

 United States, aside from any technical diffi- 

 culties in the way of such a prosecution. 



"The result of that reasoning, of course, is 

 that whatever failure in the performance of 

 duty her Majesty's Government committed 

 was a national failure, and whatever wrong 

 she committed upon us as having made her- 

 self through her subjects the accessory to the 

 rebellion was a wrong which, as it respected 

 her obligation and as it respected our rights, 

 was purely an international one, and that 

 neither the citizens of the United States nor 

 the subjects of her Majesty could have any 

 attitude in such a question other than as the 

 mere elements (as in all national questions 

 such elements must exist) which go to make 

 up the cause of national grief. 



" In this state of the case, the Government 

 of the United States and its people complained 

 of her Majesty's Government ; not that she 

 had destroyed our commerce, not that she 

 had made an illegal destruction or seizure of 

 our property, but that she had enabled a bel- 

 ligerent with whom we were nt war to exer- 

 cise a greater destructive power upon our 

 property and upon our citizens than it would 

 have been enabled to exercise but for this 

 augmentation of its faculties and its functions 

 and its powers that the subjects of her Majesty, 

 having contributed to it, enabled it to do. 

 That was our causeof complaint; and, of course 

 in presenting that cause of complaint, it re- 

 solved itself in reaching a sum total, as all 

 totals must resolve themselves into a variety 

 of elements, into a variety of particulars, in- 

 asmuch as yon never can have a total of any 



