There is a precedent which shows how impossible it is for a pretended power, without a single port, to possess belligerent rights on the ocean, and how impossible it is for the ship of such pretended power to be anything but a felon ship. James the Second of England, after he had ceased to be _de facto_ king, and while an exile without a single port, undertook to issue letters of marque. It was argued unanswerably before the Privy Council of William the Third, that a deposed prince could not receive from any other sovereign “international privileges”; “that, if he could grant a commission to take the ships of a single nation, it would in effect be a general license to plunder, _because those who were so commissioned would be their own judges of whatever they took_”; and “that the reason of the thing, which pronounced that robbers and pirates, when they formed themselves into a civil society, became just enemies, pronounced also that a king without territory, without power of protecting the innocent or punishing the guilty, _or in any way of administering justice_, dwindled into a pirate, if he issued commissions to seize the goods and ships of nations, _and that they who took commissions from him must be held by legal inference to have associated ‘sceleris causâ’ and could not be considered as members of a civil society_.”[152] These weighty words are strictly applicable to the present case. Whatever the force of Rebel Slavery on land, it is no more on the ocean than the “deposed prince,” “without power of protecting the innocent or punishing the guilty, _or in any way of administering justice_”; and, like the prince, it has “dwindled into a pirate,” except so far as sustained by British concession. In adducing this precedent, I follow the learned ex-Chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, who used it to show, that, without the concession of belligerent rights to our Rebels, “any Englishman aiding them by fitting out a privateer against the Federal Government would be guilty of piracy.”[153] But the reasoning at the Privy Council shows, also, that the concession ought not to have been made.