of the opinion given by these
leaders of the British bar, the result was simply the establishment
and administration of the Naval Department of the Confederacy in
England. There was its chief, there were its financial agents,
there its workshops. There were its vessels armed and commissioned.
Thence they sailed on their mission of destruction, and thither
they returned to repair their damages, and to renew their supplies.
Under formal contracts with the Confederate Government the colonial
ports of Nassau and the Bermudas were made depots of supplies which
were drawn upon with persistent and successful regularity. The
effects of this thoroughly organized system of so-called neutrality
that supplied ports, ships, arms, and men to a belligerent which
had none, are not matters of conjecture or exaggeration; they have
been proven and recorded. In three years fifteen million dollars'
worth of property was destroyed,--given to the flame or sunk beneath
the waters,--the shipping of the United States was reduced one-
half, and the commercial flag of the Union fluttered with terror
in every wind that blew, form the whale-fisheries of the Arctic to
the Southern Cross.

MINISTER DAYTON'S INDIGNANT PROTEST.

With this condition of affairs, permitted and encouraged by England
and France, our distinguished minister at Paris was justified in
saying to the Government of Louis Napoleon on the reception of the
Confederate steamer _Georgia_ at Brest, in language which though
but the bare recital of fact was of itself the keenest reproach to
the French Government:--

"The _Georgia_, like the _Florida_, the _Alabama_, and other scourges
of peaceful commerce, was born of that unhappy decree which gave
the rebels who did not own a ship-of-war or command a single port
the right of an ocean belligerent. Thus encouraged by foreign
powers they began to build and fit out in neutral ports a class of
vessels constructed mainly for speed, and whose acknowledged mission
is not to fight, but to rob, to burn, and to fly. Although the
smoke of burning ships has everywhere marked the track of the
_Georgia_ and the _Florida_ upon the ocean, they have never sought
a foe or fired a gun against an armed enemy. To dignify such
vessels with the name of ships-of-war seems to me, with deference,
a misnomer. Whatever flag may fly from their mast-head, or whatever
power may claim to own them, their conduct stamps th