of the Alabama, as of the Tuscaloosa.  Indeed, you had a better reason for inquiring into the antecedents of the former than of the latter, it having been alleged that the former escaped from England in violation of your Foreign Enlistment Act.  Mr. Adams, the United States Minister, did in fact demand that the Alabama should be seized, but Earl Russell, in flat and most pointed contradiction of his late conduct in the case of the Tuscaloosa, gave him the proper legal reply, to wit:  that the Alabama being now a ship of war, he was estopped from looking into her antecedents.  One illustration will suffice to show you how untenable your position is in this matter.  If the Tuscaloosa’s commission be admitted to have been issued by competent authority, and in due form (and I do not understand this to be contested except on the ground of her antecedents), she is as much a ship of war as the Narcissus, your flag-ship.  Suppose you should visit a French port, and the port admiral should request you to haul down your flag on the ground that you had had no sufficient title to the ship before she was commissioned, or that she was a contract ship and you had not paid for her, and the builder had a lien on her, or that you had captured her from the Russians, and had not had her condemned by a prize court, what would you think of the proceeding?  And how does the case supposed differ from the one in hand?  In both it is a pretension on the part of a foreign power to look into the antecedents of a ship of war—­neither more nor less in the one case than in the other.  I will even put the case stronger.  If it be admitted that I had the right to commission a tender, and the fact had been that I had seized a French ship and put her in commission, you could not inquire into the fact.  You would have no right to know but that I had the orders of my Government for this seizure.  In short, you would have no right to inquire into the matter at all.  My ship being regularly commissioned, I am responsible to my Government for my acts, and my Government, in the case supposed, would be responsible to France, and not to you.  If this reasoning be correct—­and with all due submission to his lordship I think it is sustained by the plainest principles of the international code—­it follows that the condemnation of a prize in a prize court is not the only mode of changing the character of a captured ship.  When the sovereign of the captor puts his own commission on board such a ship, this is a condemnation in its most solemn form, and is notice to all the world.  On principle, if a ship thus commissioned were recaptured, the belligerent prize court could not restore her to her original owner, but must condemn her as a prize ship of war of the enemy to the captors; for prize courts are international courts, and cannot go behind the pennant and commission of the cruiser.