Sir W. Scott are in both cases applied by Mr. Seward in a sense different from that in which they are uses. Sir William Scott does not say that an ambassador sent from a belligerent to a neutral State may be stopped as contraband while on his passage on board a neutral vessel belonging to that or any other neutral State; nor that if he be not contraband the other belligerent would have any right to stop him on such a voyage. The sole object Sir William Scott had in view was to explain the extrent of the limits of the doctrine of the involability of ambassadors in virtue of that character, for he says:

The limits that to the operations of war against them by Vattel and other writers upon the subjects are that you may exercise your right of war against them wherever the character of hostility exist. You may stop the ambassador of your enemy on his passage, but when he has arrived and has taken upon him the function of his office and has been admitted in his representative character he becomes a sort of middle man entitled to peculiar privileges, as set apart for the protection of the relations of amity and peace, in maintaining which all nations are in some degree interested.

There is certainly nothing in this passage from which an inference can be drawn so totally opposed to the general tenure of the whole judgment as that an amassador proceeding to the country to which he is sent and on board a neutral vessel belonging to that country can be stopped on the ground that the co an ambassador is a breach of neutrality, which it must be if he be contraband of war. Sir William Scott is here consider to have been laid down by writers of authority upon the subject. No writer of authority has ever suggested that an ambassador proceeding to a neutral State on board one of its merchant ships is contraband of war. The only writer named by Sir William Scott is Vattel, whose words are these:

On peut encore attaquer et arreter ses gens (i. e., gens de l'ennemi) partout of on a la liberte d'exercer des actles d'hostilite. Non seulement done on peut justement refuser le passage aux ministers qu'un ennemi envoye a d'autres souverains; on les arrete meme, s'ils entereprennet de passer secretement et sans permission dans les lieux dont on est maitre.

And he adds as and expample, the seizure of the French ambassador when passing thourgh the dominions of Hanover during war between England and France by the King of England, who was also Sovereign of Hanover. The rule therefore to be collected from these authorities is that you may stop an enemy's ambassador in any place of which you are yourself the master or in any other place where you have a right to exercise acts of hostility. Your own territory or ship of your own country are places of which you are yourself the master. The enemy's territory or the enemy's ship are places in which you have a right to exercise acts of hostility. Neutral vessels guilty of no violation of the laws of neutrality are places where you have no right to exercise acts of hostility. It would be a perversion of the doctrine that ambassadors have peculiar privileges to argue that they are less protected that other men. The right conclusion is that an ambassador sent to a neutral power is inviolable on the night seas as well as in neutral waters while under the protection of the neutral flag.

The other dictum of Sir William Scott in the case of the Orezembo is even less perminent to the present question. That releated to the case of a neutral ship uponhe evidence given on the trial was held by the court to have been engaged as an enemy's transport to convey the enemy's military officers and some of his civil officers, whose duties were intimately connected with military operations, from the enemy's country to one of the enemy's colonies which was about to be the