was then organising a European confederacy in order to fall upon England with his whole concentrated power, it must be admitted that the Whig Order in Council was not only justifiable by the law of nations, but imperatively called for by expediency. Orders providing for the blockade of harbours and coasts which it was at the moment in the highest degree perilous to enter, and for the interim detention of the Prussian cargoes, in retaliation for the unprovoked invasion of Hanover by the Prussian troops, and the exclusion of British commerce, all brought about by the direct intrigues of Napoleon, were clearly within the law of nations, and, moreover, seem now to have been, at the time and under the circumstances, a very moderate exercise of the rights of a belligerent. To attempt to palliate the Berlin Decrees on the grounds of the "barbarous" character of the previous Orders in Council, was obviously "a weak invention" of the enemy.[1]
Embargo on British ships in Russia. Russia having been bribed by the acquisition of Finland, Moldavia, and Wallachia, followed the example of Prussia, and lost no time in breaking off all intercourse with England. On the 28th of August the Emperor Alexander laid an embargo on every English ship then in the Russian ports. Napoleon
- ↑ Vide Martin's 'Law of Nations,' Sup. 5, 437, 435, and 'Annual Register,' 1806, p. 677, for the Order in Council detaining Prussian ships. In discussing "the rights of war as to neutrals," Wheaton remarks that "during the wars of the French Revolution the United States, being neutral, admitted that the immunity of their flag did not extend to cover enemy's property, as a principle founded on the customary law and established usage of nations, though they sought every opportunity of substituting for it the opposite maxim of free ships, free goods, by conventional arrangements with such nations as were disposed to adopt that modification of the universal law" (vol. ii. pp. 176, 177).
