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ship to the dungeon on shore, and rewarded for their services by confinement as prisoners of war.

Such, sir, to the experience of the American people have been the consequences of the practice of search upon the seas, and of the promulgation by belligerent tribunals of a code of neutral rights. Is it surprising that upon receiving from a nation which holds such doctrines concerning the right of search as belligerent, a proposal to extend it into the maritime code of peace, where it never yet had found pretence for a footing, they should have received it with unwillingness, and met the offer by a firm and settled, though cool and not willingly offensive denial? It is perhaps impossible that the British people and their government should feel, concerning the practice of search upon the seas, like the people and government of the United States. But if the British nation had ever known that thousands of their own native born fellow subjects had been taken by the violence of foreign officers upon the high seas, from the commercial service and from the vessels of their own country, secluded even from the means of obtaining their release or of making heard their complaint, forced to fight against the friends of Britain, and finally treated as prisoners of war, for refusing to fight against Britain herself, then, if the history of the British nation is not a fable, they never would have endured the proposition, that in the midst of peace they should grant to the very foreign officers from whom they had suffered all this, that identical right of search upon the seas, under color of which, as practiced in war, it had been inflicted. They would have loathed the neutral law of a belligerent legislator, and full of the spirit of their fathers from the days of Runnymeade, they would have said to the nation that made the proposal, no British man shall be taken from a British ship by foreign hands upon

the sea, but by the acknowledged laws of the sea, or subjected in time of peace to the laws of war.

They might have added, as we now add: we are willing on our part to declare the African slave-trader the enemy of the human kind; we are willing even with you to stipulate that your and our public naval officers, under proper guards of responsibility, shall be authorized to take the slave-trader of either nation, and to carry the culprit for conviction before the tribunals of his own country. But in granting thus far to foreign officers the ministerial power of executing our laws, we must reserve to the subject or citizen of either nation, presumed innocent till proved guilty, the right of judicial investigation by the laws and judges of his own land, and by the judgment of his own peers.

This proposition, while it concedes all the benefit that could be derived from the concession of the right of search in contributing to the suppression of the trade, would be more effectual for the direct attainment of that object itself. Were the slave-trade once recognized as piracy by the laws of nations, no single nation could afterwards withdraw its acknowledgment of it in that character; nor could war dissolve the treaties by which all would be bound to lend their aid for the accomplishment of its suppression. The right of search would then be merged in the right of capture, from which it ought never to have been separated, and the responsibility to the tribunals of the captured party, secured by stipulations indispensable for the protection of the innocent navigator, would guard against the abuses to which power without responsibility must always be liable, and which the people of the United States have found insupportable aggravations of the practice of search upon the

seas.

I pray you, etc.

Printed in the United States of America

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The Writings of John Quincy Adams

EDITED BY WORTHINGTON C. FORD

To be Completed in Twelve Volumes

Vols. I to VI, each, cloth, 8vo, $3.50

Only those writings which are of a permanent historical value and which
are essential to a comprehension of the man in all his private and public
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Quincy Adams led a very eventful life, more than fifty years of it having
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representative in Europe of experience. The third volume covers the im-
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