At an early period of society, the practice of war was doubtless the same by land or sea; and the savage slaughtered or enslaved his enemy whether he found him in his hut or in his canoe. But when centuries of civilisation began to mitigate the horrors of barbarous warfare, the restrictive rules introduced into naval hostilities were different from those adopted in the case of wars by land, as the difference of the services obviously dictated. A land army has a precise object, which it can always attain if victorious. If a general conquer a town, he can garrison it; he can levy contributions; nay, he may declare that he will appropriate it to himself in right of sovereignty. He can afford to spare the property of private individuals, when he is at liberty to seize, if he is so minded, upon all their public rights, and new-mould them at his pleasure. The seaman, on the other hand, seizes on the merchant vessel and its cargo, by the same right of superior force, in virtue of which the victor by land has seized upon castles, provinces, and on the very haven, it may be, which the vessel belongs to. If the maritime conqueror had no right to do this, he would gain nothing by his superiority except blows, when he met with vessels of force, and would be cut off from any share of the spoils of war, which form the reward of victory. The innocent and unarmed citizen, perhaps the neutral stranger, suffers in both cases; but a state of war is of course a state of violence, and its evils, unhappily, cannot be limited to those who are actually engaged in hostilities. If the spirit of philanthropy affected in the peroration to Buonaparte's decrees had been real, he might have attained his pretended purpose of softening the woes of war, by proposing some relaxation of the rights of a conqueror by land, in exchange for restrictions to be introduced into the practice of hostilities by sea. Instead of doing so, he, under the pretext of exercising the right of reprisals, introduced the following Decrees, unheard of hitherto among belligerent powers, and tending greatly to augment the general distress, which must, under all circumstances, attend a state of war.