"In the same year (1864) in which the claimants made their contract, the Confederate war department officially recognized cotton as being one of the chief munitions of war by advising that large. amounts of Confederate bonds should be issued for the separate use of that department in purchasing cotton and steamers with which to obtain military supplies from abroad." Mr. Bayard, Sec. of State, to Mr. de Muruaga, Spanish min., June 28, 1886, "The cotton within the Confederate States was publicly recited in their obligations and bonds as a security for their payment; its exportation and sale controlled and regulated by statute, and it thus became officially and publicly classified among the war assets and supplies of that government, and its destruction was authorized, wherever found, whenever military exigencies rendered it advisable to avoid capture by United States forces." Mr. Bayard, Sec. of State, to Mr. de Muruaga, Spanish min., Dec. 3, 1886, (6) SLAVES. § 1154. Article VII. of the treaty of peace with Great Britain of September 3, 1783, provided for the withdrawal of the British forces from the United States "without causing any destruction, or carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants." When the British forces withdrew from New York, they sent away in advance 3,000 negroes, whom they claimed to have emancipated. Claims were put forward on behalf of the owners for compensation and were pressed against the British Government; but they were merged in the Jay treaty, and abandoned. The treaty of Ghent contained (Art. I.) a similar clause, and again many negroes were taken away by the British forces. Claims were put forward for compensation, and the question of liability was referred to the Emperor of Russia, who rendered, April 22, 1822, an award in favor of the United States. Under the convention of November 13, 1826, Great Britain paid the sum of $1,204,960 in satisfaction of the claims. See Moore, Int. Arbitrations, I. 350-390. During the war of 1812 an American privateer captured slaves on an English ship. Held, that, especially as the law prohibited the importation of slaves, they should not be deemed prize; that the court should not however assume the responsibility of declaring them pris oners of war; but that the question of their disposition should be left to the government, to be treated as a matter of state policy. Re Certain Slaves, 5 Hughes, C. C. 55. The British Government, in the argument submitted by it to the Emperor of Russia, as to whether its forces had, by carrying away slaves, violated the obligations of Article I. of the treaty of Ghent against carrying away American property, broadly asserted the right of emancipating slaves as a legitimate right of war. "This is utterly incomprehensible on the part of a nation whose subjects hold slaves by millions and who in this very treaty [of Ghent] recognized them as private property. No such right is acknowledged as a law of war, by writers who admit any limitation. The right of putting to death all prisoners in cold blood and without special cause might as well be pretended to be a law of war. You will present the argument against it, in all its force, and yet without prolixity." Mr. Adams, Sec. of State, to Mr. Middleton, min. to Russia, No. 6, Nov. 6, 1820, MS. Inst. United States Ministers, LX. 57. "The emancipation of an enemy's slaves is not among the acts of legiti- As to the proceedings before the Russian Emperor, and his decision, see "40. There exists no law or body of authoritative rules of action between hostile armies, except that branch of the law of nature and nations which is called the law and usages of war on land. "41. All municipal law of the ground on which the armies stand, or of the countries to which they belong, is silent and of no effect between armies in the field. 6 "42. Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property (that is, of a thing), and of personality (that is, of humanity), exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it. The digest of the Roman law enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that so far as the law of nature is concerned, all men are equal.' Fugitives escaping from a country in which they were slaves, villains, or serfs, into another country, have, for centuries past, been held free and acknowledged free by judicial decisions of European countries, even though the municipal law of the country in which the slave had taken refuge acknowledged slavery within its own dominions. "43. Therefore, in a war between the United States and a belligerent which admits of slavery, if a person held in bondage by that belligerent be captured by or come as a fugitive under the protection of the military forces of the United States, such person is immediately entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman. To return such person into slavery would amount to enslaving a free person, and neither the United States nor any officer under their authority can enslave any human being. Moreover, a person so made free by the law of war is under the shield of the law of nations, and the former owner or state can have, by the law of postliminy, no belligerent lien or claim of service." "58. The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint. "The United States can not retaliate by enslavement; therefore death must be the retaliation for this crime against the law of nations." Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the The emancipation proclamation is decisive as to what was deemed the "seat of war" by the President, as it was a military measure against private property. Blanchard v. United States (1897), 32 Ct. Cl. 444. As to the proceedings of the Joint High Commission of 1871, refusing claims for emancipated slaves, see Moore, Int. Arbitrations, 1. 686. Public debts. (7) DEBTS. § 1155. By the testimony of publicists and the practice of nations, the principle is established that the obligation of a state for the payment of its debts is not affected by war even though such debts be held by citizens or subjects of the enemy. It is true that in certain early writers, who reiterated the stern rules of the law of Rome, sweeping generalizations may be found in which the right is asserted on the part of enemies to seize all property and confiscate all debts. The same writers, upon the same authority, assert the lawfulness of treating all subjects of the belligerent as enemies, and as such of killing them, including women and children. These generalizations, even at the time when they were written, neither expressed nor purported to express the actual practice of nations, and it is superfluous to declare that the law of the present day is not to be found in them; for, with the change in the practice of nations, growing out of the advance in human thought, the law also has changed. With the law of the present day as to private debts, we are not now concerned; but, as to the law touching public debts, the current of opinion is unvarying. Vattel, writing in the last century, declared: "The state does not so much as touch the sums which it owes to the enemy: money lent to the public is everywhere exempt from confiscation and seizure." This principle, says Phillimore, "is one which now may happily be said to have no gainsayers." The act of the King of Prussia, in 1752, in stopping, as an act of reprisal, the payment of interest due by him to English creditors on the Silesian loan is conspicuous not more by reason of its solitariness than by reason of the unanimity with which publicists have disapproved it. The payment of the interest was in fact resumed, but, while the question was still pending, the King of Prussia presented in justification of his course a memorial. To this memorial a famous answer was prepared for the British Government by Sir George Lee, judge of the prerogative court; Dr. Paul, the advocate-general; Sir Dudley Ryder, and Mr. Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield. In this answer there is the following passage: "It will not be easy to find an instance where a prince has thought fit to make reprisals upon a debt due from himself to a private man. There is a confidence that this will not be done. A private man lends money to a prince upon the faith of an engagement of honor, because a prince can not be compelled, like other men, by a court of justice. So scrupulously did England, France, and Spain adhere to this public faith, that even during the war they suffered no inquiry to be made whether any part of the public debt was due to the subjects of the enemy, though it is certain many English had money in the French funds, and many French had money in ours." It will be observed that Spain is here referred to as one of the powers by whose conduct the inviolability of the public faith in respect of debts was more than a century and a half ago established. Vattel described the British answer as "an excellent bit of the law of nations" (un excellent morceau de droit des gens), while Montesquieu pronounced it "an answer without a rejoinder" (une réponse sans réplique). It is commended by Twiss, by Calvo, and generally by other publicists. Says Pradier-Fodéré: "States can not confiscate to their profit that which they ought themselves to pay to subjects of the enemy, as by seizing the rents of the public debt. How, indeed, can it be admitted that a state may deprive of their due individuals who, under the guarantee of the law and the public faith, have confided to it their capital.” Fiore asserts the same principle in almost the same words, and adds: “All that we could excuse in case of extreme necessity would be the suspension of payments during the war when the want of money rendered that measure indispensable and when the state would have no other means less ruinous of providing for the urgent necessity of the war. But even that expedient, which may be excusable if the Government afterwards makes the payments which were postponed at the conclusion of peace, would always be disastrous, because it would undermine the base of the economic life of the state-the public credit." Finally, without unnecessarily multiplying authorities on a point which is undisputed, we may quote from Hall the following passage: "Property belonging to an enemy which is found by a belligerent within his own jurisdiction, except property entering territorial waters after the commencement of war, may be said to enjoy a practical immunity from confiscation; but its different kinds are not protected by customs of equal authority, and although seizure would always now be looked upon with extreme disfavour, it would be unsafe to declare that it is not generally within the bare rights of war. "In one case a strictly obligatory usage of exemption has no doubt been established. Money lent by individuals to a state is not confiscated, and the interest payable upon it is not sequestrated. Whether this habit has been dictated by self-interest, or whether it was prompted by the consideration that money so lent was given upon the faith of an engagement of honor, because a prince can not be compelled like other men in an adverse way by a court of justice,' it is now so confirmed that in the absence of an expressed reservation of the right to sequestrate the sums placed in its hands on going to war a state in borrowing must be understood to waive its right, and to contract that it will hold itself indebted to the lender and will pay interest on the sum borrowed under all circumstances." Vattel, Law of Nations, book iii. ch. v. sec. 78 (Phila. ed. 1858), 323; See, also, Pomeroy, Int. Law, 260, § 213; Pillet, Les Lois actuelles de la Pradier-Fodéré narrates, on the authority of M. Michel Chevalier (Revue |