Nor does this doctrine contravene the right of preventing vessels from entering a blockaded port.  This right stands on other ground.  When the fleet of any nation actually beleaguers the port of its enemy, no other has a right to enter their line, any more than their line of battle in the open sea, or their lines of circumvallation, or of encampment, or of battle-array on land.  The space included within their lines in any of those cases, is either the property of their enemy, or it is common property assumed and possessed for the moment, which cannot be intruded on, even by a neutral, without committing the very trespass we are now considering, that of intruding into the lawful possession of a friend.

Although I consider the observance of these principles as of great importance to the interests of peaceable nations, among whom I hope the United States will ever place themselves, yet in the present state of things they are not worth a war.  Nor do I believe war the most certain means of enforcing them.  Those peaceable coercions which are in the power of every nation, if undertaken in concert and in time of peace, are more likely to produce the desired effect.

The opinions I have here given, are those which have generally been sanctioned by our government.  In our treaties with France, the United Netherlands, Sweden, and Prussia, the principle of free bottom, free goods, was uniformly maintained.  In the instructions of 1784, given by Congress to their Ministers appointed to treat with the nations of Europe generally, the same principle, and the doing away contraband of war, were enjoined, and were acceded to in the treaty signed with Portugal.  In the late treaty with England, indeed, that power perseveringly refused the principle of free bottoms, free goods; and it was avoided in the late treaty with Prussia, at the instance of our then administration, lest it should seem to take side in a question then threatening decision by the sword.  At the commencement of the war between France and England, the representative of the French republic then residing in the United States, complaining that the British armed ships captured French property in American bottoms, insisted that the principle of ‘free bottoms, free goods,’ was of the acknowledged law of nations; that the violation of that principle by the British was a wrong committed on us, and such an one as we ought to repel by joining in the war against that country.  We denied his position, and appealed to the universal practice of Europe, in proof that the principle of ’free bottoms, free goods,’ was not acknowledged as of the natural law of nations, but only of its conventional law.  And I believe we may safely affirm, that not a single instance can be produced where any nation of Europe, acting professedly under the law of nations alone, unrestrained by treaty, has, either by its executive or judiciary organs, decided on the principle of ‘free bottoms, free goods.’  Judging