Year: 1870

the whole nation And this false attitude OF
the General Government, American statesmen
allege, is compelled by the present state OF
international law and conceded requirements
of international comfy.


Such code, in an age like this, must choose
between amendment or abrogatiOn. IL is too
much to ask of any people that their own
Government shall use the public power and
the hospitality of the country for objects OPP
posed to every sentiment they cherish and the
dearest of the principles on which their own
polity is founded. 1t is not unlikely that COM
plications arising abroad will suggest in the
quarters where this system had its origin the
expediency of adapting its provisions to the
changes time has made in the moral, intel
lectual, and political condition of the world.
The main political purpose of the code as it
stands is to afford security, against their own
subjects or dependents to Royal families, State
churches and aristOcracies. Hence its extreme
care to ordain it unlawful for one Power to
permit any aid or comfort to the subjects of
another Power in any enterprise tending to
lessen the authority, abridge the franchises of
Royalty or caste, or elevate the masses OF
mankind Nor is it to be imputed as crime
that monarchism regarded its own ends chiefly
in a forum where no adverse or rival interest
had an advocate. Reasonably it could not be
expected to have done otherwise.


Whenever reconstruction of this code shall
he taken in hand, it is to be hoped due ac-
count will be made of the fact that Popular
Government had no share in devising 1t, and
has had scarcely any in expanding it, Amerl-
can propositions received so little hospitality
at the Congress of Paris, in 1856, that our
Government withheld its adhesion to its stipu-
lations. And further, that it will be insisted
on that, if governments of popular character
are expected to be bound by it, they shall be
heard in regard to what it shall be. Ii beng
now almost wholly the Jurisprudence OF hem
isphere in which popular government, In the
sense we define it, was unknown, and It's car
dinal principle dreaded and prescribed, 1t Is
entirely fair and reasonable to raise the ques-
ton to what extent shall another hemisphere
be bound by it, in which Republics abound
and the People are regarded as the rlghtfll
sources of power, while scarcely monarchy
exists7 reasonable answer would be: just
so far as it may consent to be, and no further


American impatience of European interven-
ton in affairs concerning this continent, long
ago found expression in the Monroe Doc
"trine - and while nothing has since occurred
tending to abate that feeling, many things
have happened fitted to increase 1t. In the
present temper of the people, it is, perhaps, not
too much to say that the days are numbered
of any system of law, national as well as IN
ternational, or of comfy, which constrains an
American Executive to reinforce an armed Eu-
ropean Despotism with thirty gunboats with
one hand, and with the other to seize and
hold the almost solitary cruiser of its Republi-
can antagonist, our neighbor, which had been
driven within reach only by lack of coal where
with to keep out of it-a supply, by the way,
which Earl Granville would this day allow her
to take in at Plymouth.