Xxxvi] ON THE TRIUMPH OF NON-INTERVENTION. 915

by the secession of Kent and Essex at the mouth of the
Thames, than to set up an independent State in Louisiana.
It is not a question ever to be discussed. It is an impossibility.
 Have you not like myself been astonished at the
financial resources of the North? I have just seen a pamphlet
 recently published in Washington by Mr. Blodget on
the financial and industrial resources of the Union. I have
been astounded by the facts and figures it gives from
Government returns, railway traffics, &c., showing the
almost incredible and fabulous increase of every kind of
production in the Northern States during the last three
years of war. It is quite clear that America stands on a
different footing from the old world, and that its powers,
whether in peace or war, are to be measured by a different
standard. In comparing their powers of endurance or
recovery, we must consider the one to be a man of twentyfive
 and the other of sixty. . . .”

1864.
Zr. 60.

International Law.

“Sept. 8. (To Henry Ashworth, Hsq.)—The great fallacy
that runs through Roundell Palmer's arguments is in the
assumption that ¢ International Law? is a fixed and immutable
 code like the Ten Commandments, and that it would
be wrong in us now to set up any new precedents or innovations.
 Now the whole of what is called International
Myritime Law is mere precedents, generally emanating
from our own Courts, and then adopted by the Americans
tn times and circumstances quite different from the present,
“We agreed to a fundamental change in the bases of the
Maritime Code at the Congress of Paris after the Crimean
War in 1856, and the great error has been that we did not
seize the opportunity of the American war to still farther
relax the old system in the interests of non-combatants at
sea. Instead of which Roundell Palmer, who is a lawyer