mere question of adequacy or inadequacy within moderate bounds. Cuba. Clarissa. Messenger. Harriett.

1080. The costs are to some extent in the discretion of the court; they are in general given to the salvors, if the tender of the owners is insufficient, and refused to them if they have refused a tender of an amount found adequate (Hopewell. Favorite), and given against them if they have refused a very liberal reward (Nicolai. Hedwig), or if the amount awarded to them is less than two-thirds of the demand. Seine.

1081. If two sets of salvors sue, and one occasions vexatious costs by its mode of proceeding, the court will protect the owners against such costs (Bartley) at the expense of the offending party.

CHAPTER V.

SLAVE-TRADE.

1082. SOME writers found general law upon practice,—the law of nations on their practice, as indicating a general accord. The law affecting slave-trade is part of the law of nature, and not in all its departments a portion of the law of nations; but if law is established by practice, the trade in slaves, in the capture, sale, and purchase of our own kind and kindred, is in perfect accordance, and is unquestionably established as consonant, with natural law.

1083. From north to south, from east to west, from the most remote antiquity to a comparatively recent period of history, every faith,-Brahmin, Buddhist, Heathen, Jew, Christian, Moslem; every country,- Scythia, Ancient Britain, China, India, Batavia, Persia, Egypt, Assyria, Israel, Greece, Rome, Carthage, Russia, France, Spain, Portugal,

Italy, England, have, by their incessant practice, established the legality of the traffic in the human race.

1084. No inconsiderable portion of the trade carried on by the caravans, which traversed Asia from the earliest times, consisted in the purchase and sale, and occasionally, as they travelled along, in the capture of slaves.

1085. The trade in the Euxine involved the barter of the commodities of India and the East for the slaves which the Cimmerian and Scythian traders brought to its marts.

1086. Egypt and the Mesopotamian nations teemed with captives, sometimes sold or exchanged for others less likely to disturb the peace. At times they were transported by cities from one conquered region to another, so that by intermixing the new settlers with the former inhabitants both might be controlled.

1087. A principal part of the exports of the Britons and Saxons to the Continent consisted of the captives taken in internal wars. British slaves were admired and appreciated, and sold well in the Christian slave-market of Rome.

1088. There is no asserted right of belligerents as to enemies or neutrals, against which we shall have occasion to protest, which can appeal for its support to one-hundredth part of the authority of practice which can be adduced in support of the unrestricted dealing in slaves. If it be permitted by the law of nature, it is permitted to every one not prohibited by his municipal law to deal in human flesh and blood.

1089. But whatever names may have sanctioned the practice, whatever nations may have adopted it, nature rebels against the doctrine, and proclaims its asserter a recreant against her laws.

1090. We must not however be transported by feeling, or satisfied that denunciation proves the offence. The objections to slavery are not found in the ancient books; they have sprung from the sentiment of freedom, the development of reason, and the more generous spirit of modern

times, and modern nations are more competent to admit them.

1091. To deal usefully with the question, it is vain to resort to the captivating phrases of the thousand-and-one preachings about equality, the rights of freedom and locomotion, and Christian doctrines, for they do not apply. The Christian Scriptures do not denounce slavery, but accept it as an established condition, and teach all men to implicitly submit and obey. The abstract rights of equality, freedom, and locomotion are unquestionable. But while war exists,—and who shall suppress it ?-while the virtues and the vices concur in exciting the intellects and the energies of men, while industry and science, and ambition and avarice urge the human race, the enjoyment of abstract rights is controlled by countless impediments. The illtrained in mind can neither morally nor physically appreciate or enjoy freedom, when or wherever let loose. The poor cannot enjoy locomotion beyond the limits within which, or freedom, except subject to the conditions on which, a subsistence can be gleaned. The question is not as to the existence of natural rights, but whether, and under what circumstances, and to what extent, if at all, the law of nature justifies any in restraining or impeding the enjoyment of them by others.

1092. The justification has been sought in the real or imaginary rights of war. The pretence for the enslaving and selling of fellow-creatures rests on the unrighteous proposition, asserted even by modern authors, that by the right of war a man may kill his enemy or sell him as a slave. There is no such right. We shall deal with the limitation of the right to kill the enemy on another occasion, observing only that it is limited to the necessities of warfare. These necessities may involve a right to retain or to place a prisoner in a state of slavery; but that does not establish the right to sell him as a slave.

1093. It is not until a nation is strong, and possessed of

considerable wealth, and until the spirit of civilization has spread among the people, that captives can be retained in custody by a prison, or by the obligation of a word. Until then, the necessities of self-defence attach incidents to warfare which cease in a better condition of nations. The extent of the necessity is from time to time the measure of the right.

1094. A nation which has no prison in which to retain its captives, and which can afford them no subsistence, except such as may be earned by their labour, is entitled to employ them, or to deliver them to others who will employ and maintain them, at least until the danger is past. It is by such means only that they can be rescued from the sword or starvation. Those who receive the captives are entitled to reasonable services as the compensation for the maintenance and protection they afford. What may be the just limits of the rights of such protectors must depend upon ever-varying circumstances, into which it is unnecessary to inquire.

1095. But whatever the right of such protectors or of such captors in war, although a state of slavery is produced, the material element is wanting which constitutes traffic in slaves. That element is price-payment. Unless they can be sold, the captives are generally an encumbrance to such captors, and constitute no inducement to war; but when they can be converted into articles of commerce, they become things worth stealing, valuable plunder, to be acquired by inroads and wars, by hunts and forays more iniquitous than open war; the warriors and the thieves who perpetrate these enormities become the hirelings of the miscreants who open a mart for the purchase of the commodities which those enormities produce.

1096. Nor is war the only source of the traffic. The urgent necessities and barbarous tastes of some peoples, living in an uncivilized and precarious state, induce them to accept the proffered purchase-money for the blood of their

own children, and, perhaps, to persuade themselves that by the horrible barter the condition of their victims may possibly be improved,

1097. It is beyond our purpose to inquire into the deportation of slaves from Africa to the West, its original cause, the means by which the unfortunate creatures are procured, the mode in which they are treated, or the increase of misery which has been occasioned by the injudicious methods adopted for the abolition of the trade.

1098. The capture and enslaving of the people of a peaceful nation is an atrocious violation of international law; but the dealing in slaves is not an offence against international law. The buying and selling of slaves by the subjects of one nation, or between the subjects of two nations, is a matter with which a third has no right to interfere, unless the transaction occur within the ambit of its municipal law.

1099. The slave-trade is an offence against the law of nature, but it is not punishable unless committed within the range of some municipal law, which has declared it an offence and prescribed a penalty.

1100. The first law of which we are aware against this nefarious traffic was passed in Venice, in 864, but its inefficiency required a more stringent measure. In 878 it was declared criminal for a Venetian to permit any slaves to be received on board his vessel.

1101. It has been described and treated, by a strange application of the word, as piracy by the laws of the United States of America, and of England, Denmark, and other European nations, but that does not constitute it piracy, punishable according to the law of nations. It can only be punished according to the law of the country in which it is committed, or to which the offender belongs. (Diana. Antelope. Madrazo v. Willes. Buron v. Denman.) But foreigners committing such offences within its jurisdiction are liable to the municipal law. Del Campo v. The Queen.