hich the
enemy may think fit to lay upon British and French property.
As far as we are concerned, except that British ships are
not to enter Russian ports--which it is obvious that they
could not do without incurring the risk of a forfeiture of
their property and the imprisonment of their crews--the
trade may be lawfully carried on in any manner which the
ingenuity and enterprise of our merchants can devise. In
order to facilitate the removal of British property from the
ports of the Baltic and the White Sea, which were frozen up
at the date of the Order of the 29th of March, further leave
has been given to Russian vessels to come out of those
ports, if not under blockade, until the 15th of May; as, in
fact, it is only by taking up Russian ships that British
property in those ports is likely to be removed, as neutrals
will not enter them from fear of the blockade.

"It is not easy to convey to the mind of the mercantile
classes of the present generation, who have had no practical
experience of the state of war, the extent of the change
which is thus effected in their favour. The vigilance of our
cruisers and the acuteness of our lawyers were incessantly
employed in all former contests in tracking out the faintest
scent of enemy's property on board every vessel met on the
seas. The character of enemy's property was regarded as an
infection, and reprobated with all the terms originally
reserved for guilty practices. The mercantile ingenuity of
the country, pressed by the increased demand and exorbitant
prices of prohibited articles, was strained to evade by
every species of fraud these prohibitions, and a warfare was
carried on within our own courts of justice between the
pitiless exactions of the laws of war and the irresistible
impulse of the laws of trade. To allay, in some degree, the
inconveniences of this system, and to provide by legal means
some of those commodities which it was for the public
interest to purchase, the English and French Governments
were driven, even during the height of the Continental
System, to the granting of licences. But here again fresh
abuses of every kind arose. These licences were an
authorized mode of evading that very prohibition which the
belligerents conceived it to be for their interest t