International Law

“Sept. 3. (To Henry Ashworth, Esq.)—The great fallacy that runs through Roundell Palmer’s arguments is in the assumption that ‘International Law’ is a fixed and immutable code like the Ten Commandments, and that it would be wrong in us now to set up any new precedents or innovations. Now the whole of what is called International Maritime Law is mere precedents, generally emanating from our own Courts, and then adopted by the Americans in times and circumstances quite different from the present.

“We agreed to a fundamental change in the bases of the Maritime Code at the Congress of Paris after the Crimean War in 1856, and the great error has been that we did not seize the opportunity of the American war to still further relax the old system in the interests of non-combatants at sea. Instead of which Roundell Palmer, who is a lawyer and not a statesman, has been put forward as the exponent of British policy, and he has laid down principles which will tell fearfully against us at a future time.... The declaration of Paris in 1856 against privateering becomes a mere pretentious hoax, when we see that ships such as the ‘Georgia’ and ‘Tallahassee’ are recognized as ships of war, merely because they carry a bit of paper called a ‘Commission’ instead of one called a ‘Letter of Marque.’ It is most important that you should disabuse our ship-owners of their delusion that this declaration against privateering will be of any benefit to them after such precedents as we are now establishing in the event of our being at war.”