The Sun.
London, England, 1831-05-28 00:00:00

LAW INTELLIGENCE.

COURT OF CHANCERY, 3Li r 27 .
ALEXANDER V. TILE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.
Mr. KNIGHT and Mr. STUART were heard in
support of the appeal.

The LORD CHANCELLOR having said he should
not call upon the respondents, proceeded to give
judgment immediately. He said, if it had been
thought advisable by the parties in the cause, or
by any of them, he would have withdrawn from
taking any share in deciding it, and would have
availed himself of the assistance of the Judges,
who would have come to the discussion without
any previous knowledge of the facts, and therefore
without the possibility of bias on either side. He
admitted that the case was one of great importance
—important from the amount of money which was
in dispute, and equally important from the nature of
the principle which it involved. But at the same
time that he admitted its importance, lie must say
also, that it was, in his opinion, one of the very
clearest cases that had ever been brought before any
Court of Justice. He would proceed in the first
instance to state what were the principles of law re-
lating to prizes of war. The Crown in this country,
the republic in others, the executive authority
in all countries of modern times—and he believed
that ancient history could show no example to the
contrary—had the incontestable right to take and
enjoy prizes of all nature whatsoever, which were
made in the course of any war in which the country
might be engaged. This was a power welch the
Crown enjoyed pleno jure, absolutely, and without
controul of any kind. It might deal with such
prizes and with the produce of such prizes, either in
keeping them fur its own use, in abandoning them
to the enemy from whom they had been taken, by
restoration or in distributing them in the whole or
in part among the persons by whom they had been
taken; and this last purpose might be effected by
whatsoever scheme of distribution and in whatever
way the Crown might think fit. It was a principle
of law equally clear,—or that it flowed from that he
had just laid down,—that the right of any other
patty to have or to share in such prizes could be
derived in no other way than by the act of the
Crown. Whether, when such an act had been per-
formed by the Crown, and when the property had
been finally and fully departed with, the Crown had
riot still a power of revoking the gift it had made,
or of modifying that gift, was a question which had
never yet arisen. It was not necessary now to go
into that question; but it was clear that whenever
it should be raised, it would be found never to have
been decided in the negative. When, indeed, the
Crown had, by a solemn act, renounced the right
which it must in the first instance have had
propertyctoidedth7tha it had been de-
prizes was not prizes,
Crown over such
at an end, arid that it re-
tthe p iv‘t,i,
re-
mained as it had been before. This principle was
illustrated by some cases which had been cited yes-
terday. When the authority of venerable Judges,
the precedents afforded by the decisions of the Prize
Court Commissions, or the more venerable audio-
rity of the statutes themselves, were referred to, it
would be found that he was not straining the doc-
trine of law in this case, but that the proposition
he had advanced rather fell short of, than exceeded
those authorities. It had been decided by Sir Wil-
liam Scott, now Lord Stowell, in a case reported
in the sth Robinson, p. 182, in language which it
would be equally vain to praise or to imitate, that
before final adjudication the Crown had authority to
restore a capture to the persons from whom it had
been taken, and this although the captor had made
it his own at the risk of his own life, perhaps after
hazardous battle, or long and laborious chase, and
even after he had been at the expense of bringing
his prize into port, and at the further expense of
litigating his right to it in the Prize Court. Hard
as this case was upon the captor, he had been found
to be remediless, and in the judgment to which he
had alluded, in the case of the ship Elcidanzas, Sir
William Scott held, that the power of the Crown
extended to restoring a prize in all cases, and that
this was a principle not confined to the law of Eng-
land, but recognized in all systems of jurisprudence.
The argument in this case had been conducted with
great ingenuity, and with exemplary learning and
talent ; all that could be said upon the subject had
been advanced with admirable ability, but his Lord-
ship did not find it necessary to call upon the parties
respondent to reply to these arguments, because
when all the weight to which they were entitled
was giver) to them, the case remained perfectly
clear. His Lordship then adverted to the prize pro-
clamation published at the commencement of the
war which was concluded by the peace of Paris.
That document in the usual form expressed an aban-
donment by the King of his right in the prizes which
might be made during the war to the captors, and
there was not a word in it fromthe beginning to the
end from which could be collected any intention on

the part of the Crown to revoke or to modify the
relinquishment which it thereby made. The Act of
Parliament passed after the proclamation, and recit-
ing the proclamation, enacted that the prizes should
to the captors under that proclamation, or in
such nmanner as the Crown by any future proclama-
tion might direct. All Acts of Parliament were of
equal authority, but if one could be said to be more
" germane to the matter" than another, it was this
Prize Act, upon the case now before the Court.
That Act not only recognized, but enacted, that
the prizes should in their distribution be subject to
the future proclamations of the Crown. This,
however, applied to sea prizes, and there was no
such Act as to captures made on land ; but by the
statute of the 54th George 111. c. 86. s. 2. passed
fur regulating the payment of army prize-money,
the same principle was recognized; for although
the proclamation was recited, it was enacted that
the prizes should be divided in such propor-
tions and according to such rule of distribution for
the army as his Majesty, or as he should, under his
sign manual, direct. Now, then, he came to the
warrant which lay before him in this case. As it
was admitted that whether the first or the second
conclusions in the warrants were right or wrong was
no question here, the only question here, and the
only question to which a Court of Law could attend,
was, whether the Crown departed with the property
in 1823, and vested a right in trustees for eastui
que trusts, and which therefore could not be taken
back by -any other order. First, his Lordship
doubted the correctness of calling this a trust deed ;
it was more like a power of attorney, given to
parties who had no interest, in order to enable them
to perform certain acts. The deed here, after re-
citing the grant, and that it was expedient to ap-
point trustees for collecting and receiving the fund,
and preparing a distribution according to the scheme
recommended by the minute, conveyed the interest
to the trustees for collecting only, and said nothing
in the operative part about the other object, the dis-
tribution. There was a power given to the trustees to
prepare a scheme to be submitted to the Treasury, in
order to receive the Royal sanction, added among
other powers. All that the deed did was, to direct
the t rustees, who were mote like agents than
trustees, to lay a scheme before the Crown,after they
should have collected the fund. In 1826, the scheme
was laid before the Crown, and then the Crown
ditected the distribution to be made according to
that scheme, which then became final ; if, indeed,
it were now final, which he doubted. It had been
argued that all the trustees were to do was to per-
form an arithmetical calculation, but it was impos-
sible to construe it. It was true, as had been con-
tended, that a party might sell or assign his interest
in prize-money, but it could not be held that such an
assignment or sale would be good against the Crown
or a second grantee, until the final adjudication.
His Lordship doubted whether the Crown could at
all make it irrevocable. He was therefore of opi-
nion that tie question was wholly out of the juris-
diction of this Court, and that whether right or
wrong, correctly or incorrectly, the Crown gave
the prizes, it wa3 enough to see that they had in
fact been given. It had been said there was much
confusion and inconsistency upon the face of the
warrants, and that one of them was at variance with
the other; but if the inconsistency had been greater
than it was, this Court was precluded from going
into it on that ground. The Crown had been ad-
vised as to the distribution, and had acted on that
advice ; and this was not the place in which to
raise the question as to whether the Crown had
been well or ill advised. For these reasons his
Lordship dismissed the appeal.
Some discussion arose respecting the costs, the
settlement of which was, for the present, post-
poned by his Lordship.