The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-06 00:00:00

THE CONFEDERATE STATES.

(From the Times' Special Correspondent.)
RICHMOND, Nov. 27, 1864.
There is no branch of international law with
which the treatise of Wheaton, the well-known
American publicist, deals so frankly and unreservedly
as that delicate question, the right of intervention
by one Power in the affairs of another, which he de-
clares to be " an undefined and undefinable excep-
tion to the mutual independence of nations." De-
served compliments were paid to Mr. Wheaton upon
the first appearance of his " Elements of Interna-
tional Law" in 1836 by writers of authority in Lon-
don and Paris, in regard to his frankness about a
subject on which his predecessors had equivocated
or maintained profound silence. It is impossible
even to glance at the works of Phillimore, Twiss,
llautefeuille, Masse, Ortolan, and Heffter, who are
justly esteemed the ablest modern European expo-
nents of international jurisprudence, without assign-
ing to Wheaton's work the very highest authority,
by reason of the respect with which it is always
named by the above distinguished publicists, and of
the frequent citations they make from it. Never-
theless, it is still more impossible to read Mr.
Wheaton's remarks about the interference of neu-
tral nations between belligerents, or to study the
precedents set during the last 80 years by the prac-
tice of the Government at Washington, without
coming to the conclusion that neither Wheaton nor
any of the many American Secretaries of State who
have deftly wielded the pen ever contemplated the
possibility of the application of their words to a war
upon the American continent between two sections
of the late American Union.

This is not the place for an essay upon those topics
which were so voluminously treated a few months
ago in the columns of the Times by " Historicus"
and others. Neither is there much credit to be
gained by pointing out (than which nothing is easier)
the glaring inconsistencies between the professed
code of the Washington Government when it is a
neutral and its practice when it is a belligerent. But
I cannot forbear briefly noticing a few of the
axioms laid down by great American authorities,
when justifying the action of their Government to-
wards belligerents whose position in reference to the
Washington Cabinet was analogous to that now oc-
cupied by the Federal and Confederate States in re-
ference to the Governments of England and France.
Read by the light of their axioms, the recent seizure
of the Florida in neutral waters by a Federal cruiser
and Mr. Seward's arrogant interdicts against any
comments on the part of European nations in refe-
rence to this colossal family quarrel in America,
may well provoke indignant surprise. It may be
stated without fear of contradiction, that there has
never during the last half century been an open in-
surrectionary movement or change of Government
in Europe which the American Republic has not
been swift to encourage by recognition, or (as in
the case of Hungary in 1849) by investing an agent
in Europe with power to declare the Republic's wil-
lingness to recognise the new State in the event of
its ability to sustain itself. I have not space to cite
in this letter the record of the great Republic's po-
licy, and of its public expressions of opinion in refe-
rence to the Spanish American Republics, Greece,
Belgium, Portugal, Poland, and the sepoy mutiny
in Hindustan, though I may mention, par parenthes,
that in American journals there was much more
commendation of the sepoy insurgents as of men re-
belling against intolerable tyranny, than abhorrence
of the enormities which they stained humanity by

committing. But I will detain your readers by
briefly noticing two precedents set by the Washing-
ton Government, which will suffice to show the prin-
ciples which have guided its action in all analogous
cases.