but it is in order effectually to secure
ourselves against sea aggressions, that this provision is necessary.
Spoliations may arise from unjust orders, given by the government of a
belligerent nation to their officers and cruisers, and these may be
redressed by application to and negotiation with that order. But no
complaints, no negotiations, no orders of government itself, can give
redress when those spoliations are grounded on a supposition, that the
vessels of the neutral nation have an enemy's property on board, as long
as such property is not protected by the flag of the neutral nation; as
long as it is liable to be captured, it is not sufficient, in order to
avoid detention and capture, to have no such property on board. Every
privateer, under pretence that he suspects an enemy's goods to be part
of a cargo, may search, vex, and capture a vessel; and if in any corner
of the dominions of the belligerent power, a single judge can be found
inclined, if not determined, to condemn, at all events, before his
tribunal, all vessels so captured will be brought there, and the same
pretence which caused the capture will justify a condemnation. The only
nation who persists in the support of this doctrine, as making part of
the law of nations, is the first maritime power of Europe, whom their
interest, as they are the strongest, and as there is hardly a maritime
war in which they are not involved, leads to wish for a continuation of
a custom which gives additional strength to their overbearing dominion
over the seas. All the other nations have different sentiments and a
different interest. During the American war, in the year 1780, so fully
convinced were the neutral nations of the necessity of introducing that
doctrine of free bottoms making free goods, that all of them, excepting
Portugal, who was in a state of vassalage to, and a mere appendage of,
Great Britain, united in order to establish the principle, and formed
for that purpose the alliance known by the name of the armed neutrality.
All the belligerent powers, except England, recognized and agreed to the
doctrine. England itself was obliged, in some measure, to give, for a
while, a tacit acquiescence. America, at the time, fully admitted the
principle, although then at war.

Since the year 1780, every nation, so far as my knowledge goes, has
refused to enter into a treaty of commerce with England, unless that
provision was inserted. Russia, for that reason, would not