In fact, so slight was the distinction founded on the possession of a commission, that even privateers with commissions were sometimes treated as actual pirates and not as legitimate belligerents. In the seventeenth century, the freebooters and buccaneers who ravaged the West Indies, and who consisted of the outcasts of England and the Continent, though they were duly commissioned by France to do their utmost damage to the Spanish colonies and commerce in the West Indies, were treated as no better than pirates if they happened to fall into the hands of the Spaniards. And especially was this distinction disallowed if there were any doubt concerning the legitimacy of the letters of marque. England, for instance, refused at first to treat as better than pirates the privateers of her revolted colonists in America; and in the French Revolution she tried to persuade the Powers of Europe so to deal with privateers commissioned by the republican government. Russia having consented to this plan, its execution was only hindered by the honourable refusal of Sweden and Denmark to accede to so retrograde an innovation.[81] An illusory distinction between the prize of a pirate and that of a privateer was further sustained by the judicial apparatus of the prize-court. The rights of a captor were not complete till a naval tribunal of his own country had settled his claims to the ships or cargo of an enemy or neutral. By this device confiscation was divested of its likeness to plunder, and a thin veneer of legality was laid on the fundamental lawlessness of the whole system. Were it left to the wolves to decide on their rights to the captured sheep, the latter would have much the same chance of release as vessels in a prize-court of the captor. A prize-court has never yet been equally representative of either belligerent, or been so constituted as to be absolutely impartial between either. But, even granted that a prize-court gave its verdicts with the strictest regard to the evidence, of what nature was that evidence likely to be when it came chiefly from the purser on board the privateer, whose duty it was to draw up a verbal process of the circumstances of every visit or capture, and who, as he was paid and nominated by the captain of the privateer, was dependent for his profits in the concern on the lawfulness of the prizes? How easy to represent that a defenceless merchant vessel had offered resistance to search, and that therefore by the law of nations she and her cargo were lawful prize! How tempting to falsify every circumstance that really attended the capture, or that legally affected the captors’ rights to their plunder!