Unfriendly in the precipitancy with which it was launched, this concession was more unfriendly in substance. It was the first stage in the depredations on our commerce. Had it not been made, no Rebel ship could have been built in England: every step in her building would have been piracy. Nor could any munitions of war have been furnished: not a blockade-runner, laden with supplies, could have left the English shores, except under a kindred penalty. The direct consequence of this concession was to place the Rebels on an equality with ourselves in all British markets, whether of ships or munitions of war. As these were open to the National Government, so they were open to the Rebels. The asserted neutrality between the two began by this tremendous concession, when the Rebels, at one stroke, were transformed not only into belligerents, but into customers. In attributing to that bad Proclamation this peculiar influence I follow the authority of the Law Lords of England, who, according to authentic report, announced that without it the fitting out of a ship in England to cruise against the United States would have been an act of piracy. This conclusion was clearly stated by Lord Chelmsford, ex-Chancellor, speaking for himself and others, when he said: “If the Southern Confederacy had not been recognized by us as _a belligerent power_, he agreed with his noble and learned friend [Lord Brougham], that any Englishman aiding them by fitting out a privateer against the Federal Government _would be guilty of piracy_.”[54] This conclusion is only according to analogies of law. It is criminal for British subjects to forge bombs or hand-grenades to be employed in the assassination of a foreign sovereign at peace with England, as when Bernard supplied from England the missiles used by Orsini against the life of the French Emperor,--all of which is illustrated by Lord Chief-Justice Campbell, in his charge to the jury on the trial of Bernard, and also by contemporaneous opinions of Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Brougham, Lord Truro, and at an earlier day by Lord Ellenborough in a case of libel on the First Consul. That excellent authority, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, gives a summary drawn from all these opinions, when he says: “The obligation incumbent upon a state of preventing her soil from being used _as an arsenal_, in which the means of attack against a foreign government may be collected and prepared for use, is wholly independent of the form and character of that government.”[55] As every government is constrained by this rule, so every government is entitled to its safeguards. There can be no reason why the life of our Republic should be less sacred than the life of an Emperor, or should enjoy less protection from British law. That England became an “arsenal” for the Rebels we know; but this could not have been, unless the Proclamation had prepared the way.