bly demand.
What is it we do demand? Not that Great Britain should disclaim the
right to search American vessels, but we deny her the right to board
pirates who hoist the American flag. Yes; and to search British
vessels, too, that have been declared to be pirates by the laws of
nations, pirates by the laws of Great Britain, pirates by the laws
of the United States. That is the demand of our late minister to
London, whose letters are so much admired by the gentleman from
Pennsylvania. Now, it happens that behind all this exceeding great
zeal against the right of search is a question which the gentleman
took care not to bring into view, and that is the support and
perpetuation of the African slave-trade. That is the real question
between the ministers of America and Great Britain: whether
slave-traders, pirates, by merely hoisting the American flag, shall
be saved from capture.

"I say there is no such thing as an exemption from the right of
search by the laws of nations, and I challenge and defy the
gentleman to produce the proof. The right of search in time of war
we have never pretended to deny. Nay, we ourselves exercised that
right during the last war. And the Supreme Court of the United
States, in their decisions of prize cases brought before them,
sustained us in doing so, and said it was lawful according to the
laws of nations. And, indeed, we should have had a very poor chance
in a war with Great Britain, without it.

"But what is the right of search in time of peace? And how has
Congress felt, and how has the American government acted, on this
point? I have some knowledge on this subject. In the year 1817, when
I was about to return from England to the United States, Mr.
Wilberforce, then a member of the British Parliament, very
celebrated for his long and persevering exertions to suppress the
African slave-trade, wrote me a note requesting an interview. I
acceded promptly to his request; and in conversation he stated to me
that the British government had found that without a mutual right of
search between this country and that, upon the coast of Africa, it
would be impossible to carry through the system she had formed in
connection with the United States for the suppression of that
infamous traffic. I had then just signed with my own hand a treaty
declaring 'the