The power of Congress with respect to prizes is plenary; no one can have any interest in prizes captured except by permission of Congress.[1301] Nevertheless, since International Law is a part of our law, the Court will administer it so long as it has not been modified by treaty or by legislative or executive action. Thus, during the Civil War, the Court found that the Confiscation Act of 1861, and the Supplementary Act of 1863, which, in authorizing the condemnation of vessels, made provision for the protection of interests of loyal citizens, merely created a municipal forfeiture and did not override or displace the law of prize. It decided, therefore, that when a vessel was liable to condemnation under either law, the government was at liberty to proceed under the more stringent rules of International Law, with the result that the citizen would be deprived of the benefit of the protective provisions of the statute.[1302] Similarly, when Cuban ports were blockaded during the Spanish-American War, the Court held, over the vigorous dissent of three of its members, that the rule of International Law exempting unarmed fishing vessels from capture was applicable in the absence of any treaty provision, or other public act of the Government in relation to the subject.[1303] POLICE REGULATIONS; RENT CONTROL In enforcing the requirement of due process of law in its modern expanded sense of "reasonable law" the Court has recognized that a war emergency may justify legislation which would otherwise be an unconstitutional invasion of private rights. Shortly after the first world war, it sustained, by a narrow margin, a rent control law for the District of Columbia, which not merely limited the rents which might be charged but which also gave the existing tenants the right to continue in occupancy of their dwellings at their own option, provided they paid rent and performed other stipulated conditions. The Court, while conceding that ordinarily such legislation would transcend constitutional limitations, declared that "a public exigency will justify the legislature in restricting property rights in land to a certain extent without compensation. * * * A limit in time, to tide over a passing trouble, well may justify a law that could not be upheld as a permanent change."[1304] During World War II an apartment house owner who complained that the rentals allowed by the Office of Price Administration did not afford a "fair return" on the property was told by the Court that, "a nation which can demand the lives of its men and women in the waging of * * * war is under no constitutional necessity of providing a system of price control * * * which will assure each landlord a 'fair return' on his property."[1305] Moreover, such rentals may be established without a prior hearing because "national security might not be able to afford the luxuries of litigation and the long delays which preliminary hearings traditionally have entailed. * * *