“Could the seizure of British subjects in such cases be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an article of captured property to be adjudged without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, _would imperiously demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such a trial, these rights are subjected to the will of every petty commander._”[53] While the war was waging, the subject was still discussed. Mr. Grundy, of Tennessee, in the House of Representatives, in a report from the Committee on Foreign Affairs, said:-- “A subaltern or any other officer of the British navy ought not to be arbiter in such a case. The liberty and lives of American citizens ought not to depend on the will of such a party.”[54] Such was the American ground, occupied from the beginning without interruption, and from the beginning most persistently contested by Great Britain. The British pretension was unhesitatingly proclaimed in the Declaration of the Prince Regent, afterwards George the Fourth, given at the palace of Westminster, January 9, 1813. “The President of the United States has, it is true, since proposed to Great Britain an armistice: not, however, on the admission that the cause of war hitherto relied on was removed, but on condition that Great Britain, as a preliminary step, should do away a cause of war now brought forward _as such_ for the first time,--namely, _that she should abandon the exercise of her_ UNDOUBTED RIGHT _of search to take from American merchant vessels British seamen, the natural-born subjects of His Majesty_.… “His Royal Highness can never admit, that, in the exercise of _the_ UNDOUBTED _and hitherto undisputed right of searching neutral merchant vessels in time of war, the impressment of British seamen_, when found therein, _can be deemed any violation of a neutral flag_. Neither can he admit that the taking such seamen from on board such vessels _can be considered by any neutral state as a hostile measure or a justifiable cause of war_.”[55] In the semi-official counter statement presented by Alexander J. Dallas, at the time Secretary of the Treasury, entitled “Exposition of the Causes and Character of the late War,” this pretension is thus described:-- “But the British claim, expanding with singular elasticity, was soon found to include _a right to enter American vessels on the high seas_, in order to search for and seize all British seamen; it next embraced the case of every British subject; and finally, in its practical enforcement, it has been extended to every mariner who could not prove upon the spot that he was a citizen of the United States.”[56]