most earnest injunctions to avoid a trespass on the Neutrality laws in any measures he might take for the transport to Halifax of the volunteers who might offer to go there to be enrolled. He consults an American lawyer of eminence, transmits the opinion of that lawyer to Mr. Howe; and that opinion, we are bound to acknowledge, points out the extreme difficulty that lay in the way of recruiting; and intimates that, even where strictly legal, there is danger of false witnesses and the hostile interpretation of American juries.

We think it would have been wise if, on receiving this opinion, the British Government had instructed Mr. Crampton to drop the scheme altogether. Up to May 22nd, Mr. Crampton, however, affirms (and we see no testimony to countervail his word) that he abided strictly by the warning suggestions contained in the legal opinion he had obtained. But on the 22nd of May, 1855, Judge Kane, at the trial of Hertz and Strobel at Philadelphia, said 'I do not think that the payment of the passage from this country of a man who desired to enlist in a foreign part comes within the Act of Congress, 1818.' Mr. Crampton naturally concluded that he might take for his guide the interpretation of the law thus delivered in court by an American judge; and he may be pardoned if he did not recognise the subtle deduction upon which Mr. Gladstone, with his usual acuteness, insisted in a recent Parliamentary debate, viz., that what might be legal in an ordinary man might not be legal in a diplomatic agent. Accordingly, after Judge Kane's construction of the law, he so far relaxed his earlier caution that he authorised the payment of passage-money. Here, in the judgment of Mr. Marcy, he commits a violation of the sovereign rights of the United States. But what State can pretend to sovereign rights. which are not defined by its own laws? Is the written law to permit a certain action, and a law nowhere to be found in the statutes to make that action illegal? This is the real question raised by the affirmation of sovereign rights as distinct from legislative enactments. And we believe there is not one eminent jurisprudist in America who has not decided against the pretension which Mr. Marcy himself, after it has served his purpose in condemning Mr. Crampton, is constrained to abandon when it serves his purpose to acquit the British Government, whose instructions Mr. Crampton obeyed. We must now notice what at first seems a confusion of dates, which has led to the charge that: Mr. Crampton and the Government continued the recruiting after the engagement to abandon it had been given.

Lord Clarendon writes to Mr. Crampton, June 22, 1855, informing him that Lord Panmure wishes all further proceedings

in the matter of enlistment to be stayed, and the project to be definitively abandoned. This, be it observed, is prior to a promise made to the United States to the same effect-it is the voluntary determination of the Government after a practical experiment not actively carried on above three months. Mr. Crampton is accused of having persevered in the project despite this order. But in the next despatch to Mr. Crampton, July 2nd, Lord Clarendon states that Lord Panmure has requested the Secretary of State for the Colonial Department to instruct Sir Gaspard Le Marchant to receive certain Germans should they find their way to Halifax.' And we gather from this passage, that though 'farther' enlistment was forbidden by the despatch of June 22, yet persons actually on their way to British territory, or who had made sacrifices to join, were not rejected until the despatch of July 16th, containing the first engagement to Mr. Buchanan that all proceedings for enlistment should be put an end to, reached Mr. Crampton at Washington in the commencement of August. And the moment it did reach him, not only were all further recruits refused, as they had already been, but instructions were sent to reject recruits who had actually presented themselves on the British territory; and the utmost that can be alleged against him is that he authorised some pecuniary compensation for the mere refusal of their services. And yet when the trial of Hertz and Strobel is instituted it is in the following month-after the whole scheme had been equally abandoned by the British Government and all its diplomatic agents. Mr. Crampton is accused of concealment in his intercourse with Mr. Marcy. We should have been glad indeed if Mr. Marcy had been a Minister to whom a prudent diplomatist would have come for caution or advice in every stage of the proceeding. But was not the reserve of Mr. Marcy still more unfortunate than that of Mr. Crampton? He cannot complain that he was kept in the dark; he at least was aware of all that was going on, and collecting the evidence of Russian spies for the purpose not of prevention, but exposure. Would not a Minister desirous to prove his own open and ingenuous character, desirous not to embitter political relations, have sent at once for Mr. Crampton, and said-Information reaches me that you are, no doubt unintentionally, conniving and assisting in a breach of our laws. In a former interview I told you to respect our municipal law; now I tell you to beware how you evade the international, and offend what we hold to be our sovereign rights. For Heaven's sake, don't get the name of a British Minister into an American court of law!' Had Mr. Marcy said this, would there ever have been a quarrel?

But whatever the previous reserve of Mr. Crampton, the mo

ment

ment he receives Lord Clarendon's despatch of July 16, he writes to Mr. Marcy, informing him of the complete abandonment of the recruiting project, and representing the expediency of staying prosecutions against the acts which had thus ceased to operate and for which apology had been tendered by the British Government. Mr. Marcy returns no answer to this appeal, except that 'it was under consideration.' And without other word to our Minister, the prosecutions which could not fail to tend to inflame the American public against Great Britain, on account of a scheme then utterly abandoned and abortive, are instituted by the American Cabinet. It is here we think that the whole question shifts ground, and that, however just the complaint of America in the first instance, the complaint afterwards of England against the American Government is infinitely more grave. It will be observed that, at the first formal remonstrance of the United States Government, the project is abandoned, the regret expressed, the apology made. The American Government sullenly proceeds in a course no longer requisite to enforce its laws or secure its objects-receives the apology to return an indignity—and embitters, without a visible practical gain, all the relations existing between the two countries. Grant that it might be expedient to proceed with the prosecutions against Hertz and Strobel, and let justice take its course, whether or not it implicated or absolved the British Government and its agents, at least we think those most inclined to blame the latter, will allow that the American Cabinet should have loftily abstained from influencing the operations of the trial directly against the Government which had so earnestly protested the innocence of its intentions, and had summarily discontinued the offence. This was not so. The Attorney-General in America is not merely the law officer of the State, he is, by the constitution, a member of the American Cabinet. And thus he writes to the States' Attorney of Philadelphia charged with conducting the prosecution:

'The Government of Great Britain, with extraordinary inattention to the grave aspect of its acts, viz., the flagrant violation of our sovereign rights involved in them, has supposed it a sufficient justification of what it has done to reply that it gave instructions to its agents so to proceed as not to infringe our municipal laws; and it quotes the remarks of Judge Kane in support of the idea that it has succeeded in this purpose. It may be so. Judge Kane is an upright and intelligent judge, and will pronounce the law as it is, without fear or favour. But if the British Government has, by ingenious contrivances, succeeded in sheltering its agents from conviction as malefactors, it has, in so doing, doubled the magnitude of the national wrong inflicted on the United States.'

Here

Here the Attorney-General, a member of the American Cabinet, instructs the States' lawyer for the prosecution to pervert the care taken by the British Government to avoid infringing the municipal laws into an ingenious contrivance to shelter malefactors,' and vindictively distorts both the care to respect the law and the apology for unintentional error into acts that double the magnitude of the national wrong.' This is not all. Five days after (September 17th), the Attorney-General makes direct use of the information he can only obtain as a member of the Cabinet to instil fresh venom into the prosecution he directs. Lord Clarendon's despatch of conciliation lay yet unpublished before the American Cabinet. It was thus the Attorney-General used the unpublished document:- We are told by Lord Clarendon that these officers had stringent authority so to proceed as not to violate the municipal law: that is, to violate its spirit but not its letter. If so, the instructions themselves violate the sovereign rights of the United States.' Here the avoidance of infringement on the neutrality laws, which alone our diplomatic minister was told at the outset to respect, is turned into a violation of sovereign rights, against which he had never been warned, which constitute a claim unintelligible to the profoundest jurisprudists, which has never been asserted by a single act of the American Congress, and been put aside as untenable by the highest authorities on American law. It is more than the British Government that have a right to complain of a prosecution so directed the whole British people are wounded by proceedings against their countrymen, conducted with such a determination to aggravate the quarrel and bias the tribunal.

But it is not enough to wound our people and accuse our Government of deliberate connivance with malefactors, the prosecution must aim also at our Sovereign; and accordingly the United States' Attorney, declaring truly that he acts by the direction of the National Administration, informs the jury that inforcing this indictment against the defendant the President of the United States has struck as near at the throne of her Majesty as he is enabled to do in the shape of a criminal prosecution.' Giving the widest latitude to the privilege of an advocate in his address to a jury-making no comment on eloquent diatribes against the perfidy of England or the felonious designs of its Government-conceding such to the orthodox functions of forensic declamation, still when a lawyer, acting under the directions of the American Government, declares that its President strikes as near at the throne of the Queen of England as he is enabled by the laws to strike; and when such expressions are never disowned by the American Government,

but

but the whole course of the prosecution is rigidly vindicated and upheld, we have a right to exclaim. And you, who claim such respect for the sovereign rights of your abstract policy, allow your President to strike as near as he can at the sovereign authority of England!' We shall not stoop to examine the evidences of a trial itself, which as against the British Government and its agents was the most audacious mockery of justice which modern times have recorded--a trial in which are put upon their defence men who could not appear as defendants, could not conduct their case, cross-examine witnesses, put in their countervailing testimonies —a trial in which the accusing lawyer indicts not the accused, but the absent; in which the defending lawyer does not defend those at whom the prosecution is aimed. Not quite so bad,' says Mr. Marcy,the diplomatic minister indeed could not appear in court, but the consuls might!' How? As witnesses to be crossexamined. Cross-examined in a court in which they had no counsel-in which the lawyers on both sides would be interested in putting the worst construction on the evidence they might give the one in order to strike at the British throne, the other in order, as in duty bound, to get off Hertz and Strobel at the expense of their pretended employers-present themselves there as witnesses, they the consuls of Great Britain!it would be to acknowledge the fairness of the tribunal, which a member of the American Cabinet had instructed to condemn them. In such a trial, and upon the witness of two hireling foreigners, both of them of the lowest characterthe one of them notoriously a Russian spy-were the Government, the Plenipotentiary, and the consuls of Great Britain. assailed and condemned. Not wholly on the witness of Hertz and Strobel,' says Mr. Marcy. We beg his pardon; so far wholly on that witness-that if Hertz and Strobel had not been received as testimony-the accusation on other grounds could not have been supported for an instant, even before the most prejudiced jury; and the collateral evidence received is all distorted into corroboration of the word of these two miserable beings, and without that word would amount to nothing. For what is that collateral evidence? Chiefly,' says Mr. Marcy, 'the letters of Mr. Crampton and his Memorandum of instructions.' We turn to these guilty letters, this dreadful Memorandum. The letters are these:

SIR,-I should be happy to see you, at any time you may call, today or to-morrow. I am, &c., "JOHN F. CRAMPTON."'

Mr. Hertz.

'SIR,-With reference to our late conversation, I am now enabled

to