treasonable rebellion. To this feeling, leaning as it does to virtue's side, is to be ascribed the occasional violation of constitutional guarantees. Pure as the motive may be, I am sure your sound sense, patriotic wisdom, and reverence for all the securities of constitutional liberty, will cause you to restrain it within legitimate bounds whenever the opportunity offers itself. The restoration of the Union, you will agree with me, will no repay us for the blood and treasure being so profusely expended to accomplish it, if it is to come to us deprived of the guarantees which our fathers thought and all experience proves are soman freedom, and especially of that guarantee which the definition of treason was obviously designed to offer. Permit me to say, my dear general, that no court in any part of our loyal country would permit a persecution for treason against Messrs. Kennedy & Co., upon the facts that were and are before me, to stand for a moment. The violation of the revenue laws, the postage laws, or "the laws forbidding trade with foreign countries," cannot be construed into the "laying war against" the United States or "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." To offend in particulars is to commit the offense which the special laws may provide. But such conduct is no treason, nor could Congress, the sole body vested with legislative power, make it treason without totally and illegally disregarding the constitutional inhibition. If I am right in this view, your power over the parties was just that, and no there, that the law gives.

You say: "Their lives by every law were forfeited to the country of their allegiance." Consider of this again, general, I invoke you. To make the running of a blockade a capital offense, forfeiting the life of the perpetrator; to do the same with the violator of postal regulations, or regulations of trade; to punish, as for treason, acts which the Constitution declares Congress itself shall not so punitretch of military power not sanctioned even by that most fruitful of all reasons for passing by, as absolute and unsuited to the times, all constitutional securities-military necessity.

But in this instance you did not impose nor assume to impose a fine at all. You seized the specific thing-the third of exchange. You evidently considered that the representative of the original offering cargo. You sequestered that, and it was the exact amount of what you considered its actual value that you held to be forfeited or liable to be forfeited to the United States, because of the original illegal shipment. You now, in the paper to which I am replying, take another ground: You abandon the right to the specific thing as forfeited. You rely upon the alleged traitorous conduct of the shippers as justifying you in mulcting them in a penalty or fine. You now say that this fine was imposed in a spirit of mercy, "as their lives by every law were forfeited to the country." The question which you told one of the house you would submit to the Government was their liability to have the value of the bill sequestered-the specific bill-not whether, because of treasonable or other illegal facts, you had a right to fine them to the amount of the bill, or to any other amount, or to impose upon them any other punishment. As the representative of the country you now allege that, notwistanding your assured heinousness of their offense, you imposed upon them a "comparatively small fine, and that I, as a commissioner of the same country, refund it because of its impropriety." You forget, general, that the question of your right, in behalf of our common country, to impose a