And yet, disregarding all these things, which show how faithfully the National Government has acted, both in measures of _repression_ and measures of _compensation_, also how often the British Government asked and received protection at our hands, and how highly our example of neutrality has been appreciated by leading British statesmen,--and disowning, also, that “spirit of just reciprocity,” which, besides being the prompting of an honest nature, has been positively promised, ship after ship is permitted to leave British ports to depredate on our commerce; and when we complain of an outrage so unprecedented and so unjustifiable, all the obligations of International Law are ignored, and we are petulantly told that the evidence against the ships is not sufficient _under the statute_; and when we propose that the statute shall be rendered efficient for the purpose,--precisely as in past times the British Government, under circumstances less stringent, proposed to us,--we are pointedly repelled by the old baronial declaration, that there must be no change in the laws of England,--“_nolumus leges Angliæ mutari_”; while, to cap this strange insensibility, Lord Palmerston, in a last debate of the late Parliament, brings against us a groundless charge of infidelity to neutral duties during the Crimean War,[39] when the fact is notoriously the reverse, and Earl Russell, in the same spirit, imagines an equally groundless charge, which he records in one of his diplomatic notes, that we have recently enlisted men in Ireland,[40] when notoriously we have done no such thing. Thus are the obligations of reciprocal service and good-will openly discarded, while our public conduct, as well in the past as the present, is openly misrepresented.