The case is not yet complete. The Alabama, whose building was in defiance of law, international and municipal, whose escape was “a scandal and a reproach,” and whose enlistment of her crew was a fit sequel to the rest, after being supplied with an armament and with a Rebel commander, entered upon her career of piracy. Mark now a new stage of complicity. Constantly the pirate ship was within reach of British cruisers, and from time to time within the shelter of British ports. For five days, unmolested, she enjoyed the pleasant hospitality of Kingston, in Jamaica, obtaining freely the coal and other supplies so necessary to her vocation. But no British cruiser, no British magistrate ever arrested the offending ship, whose voyage was a continuing “scandal and reproach” to the British Government. The excuse for this strange license is a curious technicality,--as if a technicality could avail in this case at any stage. Borrowing a phrase from that master of admiralty jurisprudence, Sir William Scott, it is said that the ship “deposited” her original sin at the conclusion of her voyage, so that afterward she was blameless. But the Alabama never concluded her voyage until she sank under the guns of the Kearsarge, because she never had a port of her own. She was no better than the Flying Dutchman, and so long as she sailed was liable for that original sin, which had impregnated every plank with an indelible dye. No British cruiser could allow her to proceed, no British port could give her shelter, without renewing the complicity of England. The Alabama case begins with a fatal concession, by which the Rebels were enabled to build ships in England, and then to sail them, without being liable as pirates; it next shows itself in the building of the ship, in the armament, and in the escape, with so much of negligence on the part of the British Government as to constitute sufferance, if not connivance; and then, again, the case reappears in the welcome and hospitality accorded by British cruisers and by the magistrates of British ports to the pirate ship, when her evasion from British jurisdiction was well known. Thus at three different stages the British Government is compromised: first, in the concession of ocean belligerency, on which all depended; secondly, in the negligence which allowed the evasion of the ship, in order to enter upon the hostile expedition for which she was built, manned, armed, and equipped; and, thirdly, in the open complicity which, after this evasion, gave her welcome, hospitality, and supplies in British ports. Thus her depredations and burnings, making the ocean blaze, all proceeded from England, which by three different acts lighted the torch. To England must be traced, also, all the wide-spread consequences which ensued.