Charge of Judge Wilson to the grand jury of the circuit court for the southern district of Ohio.
If I am correctly informed, gentlemen, these statutes to which I have directed your attention comprise all that you will have occasion to examine attentively, unless you become satisfied that the neutrality law of 1818 has been violated in this district. Should complaints come before you for the breach of this law, I would ask your especial examination of the first and second sections of the act. It is known as the “Act in addition to an act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States,” approved April 20, 1818.
[518] *It is now an acknowledged fact, and one that will constitute a part of the history of our times, that within the last fourteen months a foreign power has through its ministers, consuls, and other agents in the United States, been engaged, in violation of positive law, in enlisting troops for a war upon a nation with which our Government is at peace. After what has so recently transpired in the cities on our Atlantic sea-board, and a sister city of our own State, the Federal courts and grand juries would prove derelict of duty to shut their eyes upon these flagrant violations of law.
In the war which is now being carried on in Europe the United States occupies the position of a neutral power. The rights of neutrality bring with them corresponding duties; among these duties is that of impartiality between the contending parties. By the law of nations the neutral is the common friend of both parties; consequently is not at liberty to favor one to the detriment of the other; and this impartiality permits the neutral nation to give no assistance, (when there is no previous stipulation to give it,) nor voluntarily to furnish troops, or arms, or anything of a direct use in war. No nation, either ancient or modern, has adhered more steadfastly to these rules governing neutrals than that of Great Britain.
[519] *At the commencement of the war between France and England, in 1793, an attempt was made by France to violate the neutrality of the United States by arming and equipping vessels and enlisting men within our ports to cruise against the shipping and merchant marine of England. Great Britain, conscious of the kind and sympathetic feeling then existing between the citizens of this country and France, became alarmed, and protested with arguments of great force to the claims made on this country by the French minister, M. Genet, in behalf of his government. And those of you, gentlemen, who retain fresh in your minds the history of those times, or who are at all familiar with the American state papers, will not fail to remember with what ability and wisdom Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State under President Washington, defined the neutral policy of the United States. This policy was in accordance with the then expressed views of the British government, and resulted in the unqualified denial to France of her demands. Accordingly the American Congress, in 1794, passed an act embracing this policy, which act was revised and re-enacted in 1818, and this is the statute to which I have specially called your attention. This law having originally passed under the auspices of Washington, thus recognized at an early date in this country, not only the obligations of neutrality, *but the duty of the Government to enforce them. [520]
The English government certainly cannot plead ignorance of this policy or complain of American legislation upon this subject, for, not [Page 637] content with what her great lawyers and statesmen had for more than a century claimed to be a well-established matter of international law, the British Parliament, in 1819, passed what is called “the enlistment act,” which is substantially a copy of the act of the American Congress of 1818.
If ever there is anything which will justify a sensitive and uneasy feeling in the people of the United States, it is when their laws are put at defiance and trampled under foot by the sanction of a foreign government. Neither will they recognize or admit of any palliation for this course of conduct on the part of the offending government or its citizens, on the ground of necessity, or that the belligerents in a foreign war, on the one side or on the other, have a just or an unjust cause. With the morale of this European controversy we have nothing to do, and whether it would be better for mankind that the standard of the crescent should be upheld by the armies of Christendom in the Ottoman Empire, or whether it should be supplanted by that of the cross, is a matter not to be considered by American courts and juries in administering the laws of the United States. It is unnecessary that I should make further comment upon the provisions of this act of 1818, or the cause which led to its passage. I am confident that in relation to this, as in all duties imposed on you as grand jurors, you will act fearlessly and faithfully, and as men fully impressed with the importance of maintaining the sovereignty of the laws.