"The right of search, certainly, to attain these ends, but to attain no more. If nations denounce piracy, for instance, and employ especial agents to detect and overcome the free-booters, there is reason in according to these agents all the rights that are requisite to the discharge of the duties: but, in conceding this much, I do not see that any authority is acquired beyond that which immediately belongs to the particular service to be performed. If we give a man permission to enter our house to look for thieves, it does not follow that, because so admitted, he has a right to exercise any other function. I do believe that the ship in chase of us, as a public cruiser, ought to be allowed to board this vessel; but finding nothing contrary to the laws of nations about her, that she will have no power to detain or otherwise molest her. Even the right I concede ought to be exercised in good faith, and without vexatious abuses." "But, surely, you must think that in carrying off a refugee from justice we have placed ourselves in the wrong, and cannot object, as a principle, to the poor man's being taken back again into the country from which he has escaped, however much we may pity the hardships of the particular case?" "I much question if Captain Truck will be disposed to reason so vaguely. In the first place, he will be apt to say that his ship was regularly cleared, and that he had authority to sail; that in permitting the officer to search his vessel, while in British waters, he did all that could be required of him, the law not compelling him to be either a bailiff or an informer; that the process issued was to take Davis, and not to detain the Montauk; that, once out of British waters, American law governs, and the English functionary became an intruder of whom he had every right to rid himself, and that the process by which he got his power to act at all became impotent the instant it was without the jurisdiction under which it was granted." "I think you will find the captain of yonder cruiser indisposed to admit this doctrine." "That is not impossible; men often preferring abuses to being thwarted in their wishes. But the captain of yonder cruiser might as well go on board a foreign vessel of war, and pretend to a right to command her, in virtue of the commission by which he commands his own ship, as to pretend to find reason or law in doing what you seem to predict." "I rejoice to hear that the poor man cannot now be torn from his wife!" exclaimed Eve. "You then incline to the doctrine of Mr. Blunt, Miss Effingham?" observed the other controversialist a little reproachfully. "I fear you make it a national question." "Perhaps I have done what all seem to have done, permitted sympathy to get the better of reason. And yet it would require strong proof to persuade me that villanous-looking attorney was engaged in a good cause, and that meek and warm-hearted wife in a bad one!"