were incessantly employed in all former contests in tracking out the faintest scent of enemy’s property on board every vessel met on the seas.  The character of enemy’s property was regarded as an infection, and reprobated with all the terms originally reserved for guilty practices.  The mercantile ingenuity of the country, pressed by the increased demand and exorbitant prices of prohibited articles, was strained to evade by every species of fraud these prohibitions, and a warfare was carried on within our own courts of justice between the pitiless exactions of the laws of war and the irresistible impulse of the laws of trade.  To allay, in some degree, the inconveniences of this system, and to provide by legal means some of those commodities which it was for the public interest to purchase, the English and French Governments were driven, even during the height of the Continental System, to the granting of licences.  But here again fresh abuses of every kind arose.  These licences were an authorized mode of evading that very prohibition which the belligerents conceived it to be for their interest to maintain.  They conferred a monopoly on the holder of the licence, which enabled him to sell his cargo of French wines or French silks at a prohibition price; and the law books of the time are still full of the endless litigation and fraud to which these practices gave rise.

“From all these evils we trust that the Order in Council of the 15th April has permanently relieved us, and the change it is calculated to bring about in the state of war is not of inferior importance to that which marked the transition from Protection to Free Trade in the state of peace.  The system of licences is at an end, for all the liberty of trade with the enemy which it is in the power of the Government to confer at all, is thus conferred at once, and indiscriminately upon all; and, unless the Russian Government find means to maintain a prohibitive system on their frontiers, we hope that the supply of raw material from that country will not be reduced to scarcity.”

In addition, however, to this very lucid explanation, it may be added, that it might become necessary to grant licences to trade directly (with the consent of our allies) to the Russian ports.

That on the part of British vessels, the

“entering or communicating with any port or place in the possession or occupation of the enemy, will place the English vessel in the position of an illegal trader, and that the vessel will then be liable to the same penalties as if this Order had not been published.”

With respect to Contraband, it will have to be remembered that contraband to Russia will not be contraband to England, unless it is despatches, treasonable letters, enemy’s forces, secret agents or spies.  Neutral property on board an enemy’s vessel is not generally liable to seizure, unless on an “armed vessel of force;” but even this, by the Order, seems to be protected.  By the same Order, British property on Russian vessels is not protected.  It is quite in the option of neutrals, or British vessels, to break any Russian blockade.