examples have happened within a century past, where an embassador has been punished for any offence, however atrocious in it's nature. [Footnote e: As was done with count Gyllenberg the Swedish minister to Great Britain, _A.D._ 1716.] [Footnote f: Sp. L. 26. 21.] [Footnote g: Van Leeuwen _in Ff._ 50. 7. 17. Barbeyrac's Puff. l. 8. c. 9. Sec. 9. & 17. Van Bynkershoek _de foro legator._ c. 17, 18, 19.] [Footnote h: 1 Roll. Rep. 175. 3 Bulstr. 27.] [Footnote i: 4 Inst. 153.] [Footnote k: 1 Roll. Rep. 185.] [Footnote l: Foster's reports. 188.] [Footnote m: _Securitas legatorum utilitati quae ex poena est praeponderat._ _de jur. b. & p._ 2. 18. 4. 4.] IN respect to civil suits, all the foreign jurists agree, that neither an embassador, nor any of his train or _comites_, can be prosecuted for any debt or contract in the courts of that kingdom wherein he is sent to reside. Yet sir Edward Coke maintains, that, if an embassador make a contract which is good _jure gentium_, he shall answer for it here[n]. And the truth is, we find no traces in our lawbooks of allowing any privilege to embassadors or their domestics, even in civil suits, previous to the reign of queen Anne; when an embassador from Peter the great, czar of Muscovy, was actually arrested and taken out of his coach in London, in 1708, for debts which he had there contracted. This the czar resented very highly, and demanded (we are told) that the officers who made the arrest should be punished with death. But the queen (to the amazement of that despotic court) directed her minister to inform him, "that the law of England had not yet protected embassadors from the payment of their lawful debts; that therefore the arrest was no offence by the laws; and that she could inflict no punishment upon any, the meanest, of her subjects, unless warranted by the law of the land[o]." To satisfy however the clamours of the foreign ministers (who made it a common cause) as well as to appease the wrath of Peter[p], a new statute was enacted by parliament[q], reciting the arrest which had been made, "in contempt of the protection granted by her majesty, contrary to the law of nations, and in prejudice of the rights and privileges, which embassadors and other public ministers have at all times been thereby possessed of, and ought to be kept sacred and inviolable:" wherefore it enacts, that for the future all process whereby the person of any embassador, or of his domestic or domestic servant, may be arrested, or his goods distreined or seised, shall be utterly null and void; and the persons prosecuting, soliciting, or executing such process shall be deemed violaters of the law of nations, and disturbers of the public repose; and shall suffer such penalties and corporal punishment as the lord chancellor and the two chief justices, or any two of them, shall think fit. But it is expressly provided, that no trader, within the description of the bankrupt laws, who shall be in the service of