11:13-. SEWARD VERSUS LORD STANLEY.
IT is not very easy to explain (except politically) the praise which has been bestowed on the ability of Mr. Seward's • despatches in the recently published correspondence on the Alabama claims. They seem to us, like most of Mr. Seward's productions, wordy and windy attempts to write up to some ideal in Mr. Seward's own mind of the proper grandeur of a United States' despatch ; and, by grossly overstating the case .of his Government, to weaken the very strong claim for some reparation on our part which it really' had. In discussing -dry questions of international procedure and law, where the matter is one solely of precedent, and no one in his senses supposes that a precedent given is intended to suggest any seneral analogy between the condition of the nations whose 'case is cited and that of those to whose case it is applied, Mr. Seward will insist on getting upon his high horse because a Federal is compared to a Turk, and a Confederate to a Greek. " I pass without comment Lord Russell's justification of the Queen's proclamation, by assimilating the situation .here in 1861 to that of the Greeks rising against their "Turkish oppressors in 1825. It could hardly be expected ;that this Government would be converted by an argument that -assimilates them to the Ottoman power in its decline, and the slaveholding insurgents to the Christian descendants of heroic ,Greece in their re-ascent to civilization." Mr. Seward, if he had had any strength in him at all, might have spared that silly piece of magniloquence. It would be just as wise, and as germane to the question, for a peer to resent his physician's reasoning on the course of his disease from what he had • observed of the same complaint in a man of low rank, as for Mr. Seward to ignore the application of a dry precedent of international law taken from the case of Turkey, to that nobler breed of mortals proper to the free United States. It .seems to us that every strong position which the United States has, is weakened in the discussion with Lord Stanley, by Mr. Seward's pedantic exaggeration and feeble digressiveness.
It was especially foolish and, as it seems to us, an act of mere 'childish vanity, to return at all to the question of what Mr. Seward calls the premature recognition of the Confederates' belligerent rights. We have always thought it would have been more decent for England to have waited for the arrival of Mr. Lincon's ambassador, Mr. Adams, and to have heard respect- fully what he had to say before deciding on a step of this magni- tude,—especially as the delay need not have been, even then, :above forty-eight hours. There was something of rudeness in the manner of an act apparently almost hurried to prevent hear- ing Mr. Adams's arguments against it. But it is not digni- fied to insist on the enormity of a mere impoliteness. And Mr. Seward himself is scarcely able to argue gravely that it was not Absolutely within the competence, and indeed a part of the duty, of the British Government to decide for itself, in the view of all the facts of the case, whether, and when if at all, it should re- cognize the Federal blockade of the Southern ports, subject its own subjects to the penalties of breaking such a blockade, and relieve the United States of all responsibility for the acts of the South to British subjects. As Mr. Seward knows, even American lawyers, carefully balancing the question of prema- tureness, scarcely pretend to find a case against Great Britain, and virtually concede that it was a question of pure discretion, on which no power could decide for another. " The recognition of belligerent rights," says Mr. Dana, in his edition of Wheaton's International Law, with reference to this very case, "is not solely to the advantage of the insurgents. They gain the great advantage of a recognized status, and the opportunity to employ commissioned cruisers at sea, and to exert all the powers known to maritime warfare, with the sanction of foreign nations. They can obtain abroad loans, military and naval materials, and enlist men, as against everything but neutrality laws;, their flag and commissions are acknow- ledged ; their revenue laws are respected, and they acquire a quasi-political recognition. On the other hand, the parent Government is relieved from responsibility for acts done in the insurgent territory ; its blockade of its own ports is re- spected ; and it acquires a right to exert, against neutral commerce, all the powers of a party to maritime war." How important these last powers were to the United States no one knows better than Mr. Seward. He wants to make it out that the United States might have had all the advantages, and none of the disadvantages, of a recognized state of belli- gerency. But his own authorities tell him that "if it is not a war, the cruisers of neither party can stop or search the foreign merchant vessel, and that vessel may resist all attempts in that direction, and the ships of war of the foreign State may attack and capture any cruiser persisting in the attempt." * How would Mr. Seward have liked to have not only lost all power of capturing our blockaderunners, but to have seen them appealing for defence to British naval vessels to protect them against un- lawful interference with their trade on the part of the Federal cruisers ? Yet that would have been the speedy result of our declining to give the North belligerent rights against us as neutrals.
Mr. Seward in reverting thus foolishly to the mistakes of his early administration, of course ignores the real strength of his case, which rests on the strongest grounds of policy and international morality, rather than on grounds of strict law. As a matter of fact, owing to a various complication of causes, England did allow a number of vessels to escape under more or less suspicious circumstances from our ports, for the sake of preying on the Federal commerce. In one case at least, that of the Alabama, the escape was noto- riously due to the negligence of subordinate English officials, and was against the wish and purpose of the Government. Our Government never denied its obligation to prevent the escape of these vessels so far as it could find respectable evidence of an illegal purpose, and in two con- spicuous instances it even detained vessels whose owners it could not convict, by an act of arbitrary authority beyond its legal right. It did not deny that the English people if engaged in a war would have been bitterly provoked by similar treat- ment on the part of American shipbuilders. It recognized clearly the high impolicy of making a precedent which would have rendered it possible even for a Maori King to com- mission a regular ship of war on this side of the water, which had never been in a Maori port and had never had its deck trodden by a Maori foot. In short, whether technically within the letter of the law or not, English statesmen have not hesitated to admit that in permitting the escape of these vessels we had opened a prospect of great danger for ourselves in the future, which it would have been in- finitely better to avert even at a, great cost. No doubt, too, our negligence was in great measure due to unfriendly feeling to- wards the North on the part both of people and of statesmen, who ought to have felt very differently. No doubt Ministers were not themselves inclined to detain the earlier vessels by acts of arbitrary authority, such as they were afterwards compelled to resort to on detaining the rams. No doubt, if they had earlier risked equally strong measures, they would have incurred some danger of being turned out by the House of Com- mons,—though we doubt if the Tories would at any time have accepted the responsibility of an American war as the price of office. No doubt, had all England taken the view in 1862 which
* Dana's edition of Wheaton, r. 86, note.
was taken in a few unpopular journalslike our own, neither the Alabama, nor probably any other of the English-built cruisers, would have escaped. No doubt, sympathy with the Confederates blinded both statesmen and people to dangers which we all see very clearly now in the precedent of the Alabama and her consorts ; and no doubt, if Lord Stanley's offer of arbitra- tion had been accepted, we should have found an arbitrator,— and not been very sorry to find an arbitrator,—who would have adjudged us to have been remiss in the discharge of our obligations to a friendly State, and have decided that we ought to pay for that remissness. But Mr. Seward has lost all the re- putation which so important a decision against us and in his own favour would have brought to his Administration by the foolish vanity of his long-winded tirades. And what we, of course, hold to be worse, we have lost the opportunity of admitting that we were in the wrong, and destroying the future validity of our own disastrous precedents, through the same cause. It would have been ridiculous and mischievous to submit to arbi- tration as to whether we were wrong or not in recognizing the legal validity of the blockade over the Southern ports, and giving the United States the power against us which belligerents possess against neutrals. No statesman in his senses could have answered otherwise than Lord Stanley answered to this preposterous demand. And it seems to us a matter for deep regret that the vain-glorious and wordy statesman on the other side of the Atlantic has been misled into a policy which both denies him a triumph he might fairly have achieved, and prevents us from recanting errors of most dangerous and mis- chievous augury for the future history of England.
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