Page:Confederate Portraits.djvu/267

 alizing pursuit in which they are engaged, it is next to impossible that any discipline can be established or maintained among them. In short, they are little better than licensed pirates ; and it behooves all civilized na- tions, and especially nations who, like ourselves, are ex- tensively engaged in foreign commerce, to suppress the practice altogether." ^

By this time, I imagine that the indignant Southern reader is inquiring what twopenny authority I am thus setting up against the best legal judgment of the North itself. I answer, with hilarious satisfaction, no less an authority than Captain Raphael Semmes, who, in dis- cussing the question generally with regard to Mexico, had little forethought of himself as a commissioned offi- cer of the Confederate States.

No doubt he would have had a luxury of excuses and explanations, many of them reasonable. Still, I think we have here a delightful illustration of the difTerence be- tween abstract theories and concrete applications, and if Seward and Welles could have got hold of this passage, they would have hailed it with infinite glee, as indeed the utterance of a Daniel come to judgment.

Pirate or not, the career of the Sumter, and far more that of the Alabama, have a flavor of desperate adven- ture about them, which does not lack fascination for lovers of romance. '* Engaged in acts somewhat sug- gesting the pranks of the buccaneers," is the modest comment of Second Lieutenant Sinclair, and the facts

�� �