, which have been known at all times and in all countries, and
never have been placed among those deemed contagious. As we advance in
our knowledge of this disease, as facts develop the source from which
individuals receive it, the State authorities charged with the care of
the public health, and Congress with that of the general commerce, will
become able to regulate with effect their respective functions in these
departments. The burthen of quarantines is felt at home as well as
abroad; their efficacy merits examination. Although the health laws of
the States should be found to need no present revisal by Congress, yet
commerce claims that their attention be ever awake to them.

Since our last meeting the aspect of our foreign relations has
considerably changed. Our coasts have been infested and our harbors
watched by private armed vessels, some of them without commissions,
some with illegal commissions, others with those of legal form, but
committing piratical acts beyond the authority of their commissions.
They have captured in the very entrance of our harbors, as well as
on the high seas, not only the vessels of our friends coming to trade
with us, but our own also. They have carried them off under pretense of
legal adjudication, but not daring to approach a court of justice, they
have plundered and sunk them by the way or in obscure places where no
evidence could arise against them, maltreated the crews, and abandoned
them in boats in the open sea or on desert shores without food or
covering. These enormities appearing to be unreached by any control of
their sovereigns, I found it necessary to equip a force to cruise within
our own seas, to arrest all vessels of these descriptions found hovering
on our coasts within the limits of the Gulf Stream and to bring the
offenders in for trial as pirates.

The same system of hovering on our coasts and harbors under color of
seeking enemies has been also carried on by public armed ships to the
great annoyance and oppression of our commerce. New principles, too,
have been interpolated into the law of nations, founded neither in
justice nor the usage or acknowledgment of nations. According to these
a belligerent takes to itself a commerce with its own enemy which it
denies to a neutral on the ground of its aiding that enemy in the war;
but reason revolts at such an inconsistency, and the neutral having
equal right with the belligerent to decide the question, the interests
of