sess, although
in the progress of the contest such power may be developed.

The Southern Confederacy had an organized government and great
armies. To that extent its power was a fact. But when foreign
governments recognized in the insurgents the rights of ocean
belligerency, they went beyond the fact. They were actually giving
to the Confederacy a character which it did not possess and which
it never acquired. For the Confederacy had not a ship or an open
port. Whenever an insurgent power claims such right, it must be
in condition to assume and discharge the obligation which such
rights impose. When any power, insurgent or recognized, claims
such right,--the right to fly its flag, to deal in hostility with
the commerce of the world, to exercise dangerous privileges which
may affect the interests and complicate the relations of other
nations,--it must give to the world a guaranty that it is both able
and willing to administer the system of maritime law under which
it claims such rights and powers, by submitting its action to the
regular and formal jurisdiction of Prize Courts. Strike the Prize
Court out of modern maritime law and the whole system falls, and
capture on the sea becomes pure barbarism,--distinguished from
piracy only by the astuteness of a legal technicality. The Southern
Confederacy could give no guaranty. Just as it undertook to
naturalize foreign seamen upon the quarter-deck of its roving
cruisers, so it undertook to administer a system of maritime law
which precluded the most solemn and important of its provisions--
a judicial decision--and converted the humane and legal right of
capture into an absolute and a ruthless decree of destruction. No
neutral has the right to make or accept such an interpolation into
the recognized and essential principles of the law of maritime
warfare.

ENGLAND'S MALIGNANT NEUTRALITY.

The application of this so-called neutrality to both the so-called
belligerents was not designed nor was it practicable. In referring
to the obligation of the neutral to furnish no assistance to either
of the belligerents, one of the oldest and most authoritative of
international law writers says: "I do not say to give assistance
equally but to give no assistance, for it would be absurd that a
state should assist at the same time two enemies. And besides it
would be impossible to do it with equality: the same things, the
like number