and I was depressed by a thousnd fears. But had I calculated the time it would take them to make out the papers and get ready to send my sister to the boat, I need not have lived an age of anxiety in four hours. "When the boat was about three rods from the ferry-landing on this side, Caroline recognised me in the crowd, and came forward and waved her handkerchief. I soon recognised her, and I suppose I behaved myself rather childishly, judging from the description which my friends gave me of my actions and utterances. In a few moments more my sister was in my arms. Oh! it was a glorious meeting. My first feelings of joy in gaining my own freedom were not half so ecstatic. "My sister brought me some of the soil from my mother's grave, and a piece of the rude board that marks her resting-place. The board is very much decayed, but I shall cherish it with a sacred affection until I shall be permitted to stand near it, and hear the song of the slaves' emancipation sung as the jubilee of the race." Upon this case the Daily News remarks::- "Enabled by the kindness of his English friends to pay down the market value of his sister and her children, Mr. Martin, himself an escaped slave set about their deliverance from a situation full of horrible contingencies, and addressed himself by letter to their reverend owner. The proposition was, in fact, to buy old Mr. Dorson's grandchildren and their mother; but this was not the reverend gentlemen's difficulty; he had no delicacy on that score. fact, as far as getting rid of his unhappy relatives, and obtaining hard cash for them goes, he appears to have acted with considerable decision and promptitude. shewed the letter to a couple of Kentucky slave-dealers who were in those parts, and these men, seeing an opportunity of making a profiit by the transaction, bought them in order to sell them again to Mr. Martin. Mr. In He Curwen publishes their letter, which is a fair, straightforward business-like communication, very different from that which the Rev. Mr. Dorson addressed to his anxious correspondent. That reverend gentleman, we are told, is "greatly respected in his neighbourhood,"-that is, by his fellow slave-owners, and we can well believe it. If his sermons are like his letters, his function must be to wrest and pervert the principals of our holy religion, and makes it the prop and stay of the greatest of social villanies. Such a man must be invaluable in slave society. But there was no reason why he should export his sophistications to Boston. Ile writes, however, a letter which reminds us of nothing so much as the letters of Taylor the murderer, lately published. There is in them the mixture of wickedness and complacent religious sentiment, presuming even to be be didactic. 66 Knowing Caroline to be a Christian, he wants to keep her in the slavery which has defiled her, and fears that if he was to sell her into freedom he should be responsible for her moral and social ruin. We wonder what constiutes a woman's ruin down South. However the reverend gentleman's scruples were not insurmountable, for at the sight of the gold he was ready to entrust not only Caroline, but with her 'the slave girl Ada, a quadroon, with hazel eyes, age 16,' to the tender mercies of two travelling speculative slave-dealers, who could have sold them next day to the highest bidder. "We have not brought forward the case of this hardened and conscience-seared old clergyman for its singularity; for all who know Southern literature or Southern society know that his thoughts and words are such as, under similar circumstances, would be heard wherever slaves have long been held. But we see from this case how helpless the South is to reform itself."-Daily News, Sept. 26., 1862. PRINTED BY J. BOWTELL & Co., 17, HIGH STREET, POPLAR. THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF BELLIGERENTS AND NEUTRALS WITH REFERENCE TO MARITIME COMMERCE. BY JAMES LORIMER, ESQ., ADVOCATE, REGIUS PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. A LECTURE DELIVERED TO THE LEITH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ON DECEMBER 29, 1864. EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY THOMAS CONSTABLE. MDCCCLXV. THE CHAIRMAN OF THE LEITH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HAS THE HONOUR OF PRESENTING TO THE MEMBERS OF THE CHAMBER THE FOLLOWING LECTURE, WHICH WAS DELIVERED AT HIS REQUEST. LEITH, JANUARY 3, 1865. GENTLEMEN, When I find myself in the presence of a maritime community, I feel as if I had reached the fountainhead of that special branch of the science of Jurisprudence which it is my duty and my privilege to cultivate. The law of nations, it is true, like every other branch of positive law, has its ultimate source in nature itself,—in the powers which God has given us, in the dispositions which He has implanted in us, in the conditions which He has imposed on our activity. We must betake us to the study of ourselves, both absolutely and in relation to surrounding existences, before we can hope to discover with certainty the special rules by which it is His will that our conduct should be governed in particular circumstances. It is for this reason that, in accordance with the wise traditions of our ancestors, the study of Jurisprudence, wherever it is scientifically pursued, still begins, or terminates, with the study of natural law. The latter is the course to which the existing arrangements of our University point, and I think that, on the whole, it is the wiser course. There must be no missing link in the chain that binds the pettiest and apparently the most arbitrary human arrangement to the God-given principle of nature which it seeks to vindicate. A law A that is not traceable to a divine original is no law at all; and he who does not habitually bring the whole sequence consciously before his mind, is not an educated jurist, however shrewd and busy he may be. Nor is the necessity of regarding positive law in this absolute light imposed on lawyers alone, or on those who have been the recipients of the higher mental culture. The simplest man, who is a true man and honest with himself, will be tortured at times with the question: "Why should it be so?" till he has got hold of "the reason of the thing," till he has seen it, or felt it, in this higher sense. But though our studies must conduct us to this result at last, the point at which we take them up is comparatively unimportant. The two or three links of the chain that are nearest to the human end of it, are the most easily seen; and if it were not for the risk which the lower class of minds incur, of resting satisfied with these links altogether, I see no objection to the study of the law commencing with practice and ascending to principle. Such, at any rate, has been the process by which the law itself has been developed. Its divine origin, and the necessary dependence of the minutest practical rules on the widest and deepest principles, has dawned only gradually on mankind. The want of reflection, and the absence of scientific culture in the ruder stages of society, rendered experience the only possible guide. Experience, too, was often misunderstood and forgotten; reliable facts were slowly collected and hastily generalized; and knowledge was bought, necessarily then, as we, from adhering too exclusively to the same tentative system, buy ours needlessly still-at a terrible price. As it was with the law generally, so it was with the |