The treaty proceeds on the idea of earnest work, and it recognizes two especial agencies, each of which has been discussed between the two Governments in former years, but has always failed of adoption. The first is a mutual and restricted right of search, and the second is the well-known system of mixed courts, for the enforcement of the treaty. The treaty has just been read, so that I need not recite in detail the terms of these two provisions. I pass at once to the consideration of their origin and necessity. * * * * * There was a time when our country was open and earnest against the slave-trade. A well-known provision of the Constitution, classed among original compromises, restrained Congress from prohibiting it prior to the year 1808; but, just so soon as it had the power, Congress acted. Its promptitude justified the enthusiasm with which Judge Story in his Commentaries remarks: “It is to the honor of America that she should have set the first example of interdicting and abolishing the slave-trade in modern times.”[291] By Act of Congress, bearing date as early as March 2, 1807, and to take effect January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited, under penalties of imprisonment, fine, and forfeiture. These were increased by Act of Congress of April 20, 1818. But mild and moderate enactments were not enough; and at length, by Act of May 15, 1820, Congress was constrained to declare the slave-trade piracy, and to punish it with death. Since then this offence has stood in the catalogue of capital crimes. Already this immense subject had occupied the attention of the great European powers. In the Treaty of Paris in 1814, Great Britain and France united against what was denounced as “a species of commerce equally repugnant to the principles of natural justice and the lights of the times.”[292] This was followed by the Treaty of Ghent, at the close of the same year, in which the United States and Great Britain denounced the traffic in slaves as “irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice,” and promised their best endeavors for its suppression.[293] Then came the Treaty of Vienna, where the great powers joined in declaring it “repugnant to the principles of humanity and of universal morality.”[294] These were declarations only. The next attempt was to find a system of action, which should be effective against the Protean monster in the many metamorphoses it was able to assume, and here England nobly took the lead. Lord Castlereagh instructed the Duke of Wellington, the British ambassador at Paris, to obtain from France the concession of a mutual right of search for the enforcement of the denunciation in which they were agreed; but this was found unwelcome to the French Government, and therefore not pressed at the time. Such was the beginning of the proposition, which, after various fortunes, is at last recognized in the treaty now before us.