A much more difficult question arose connected with the competency of the court. Its organization arose out of the exigences of war; the alternative lay between a recognition of its jurisdiction, and the extreme right of the belligerent to burn and sink his captures. Congress, in a declaration of war, virtually invests the executive with authority to prosecute it, and secure the ends for which it has been waged. He is necessarily entrusted with extraordinary discretion and corresponding powers; when, in the due prosecution of these measures, he finds himself borne beyond their statutory provisions, and surrounded by exigences, lying at the time perhaps beyond the purview of legislative enactment, he must either forego the objects which animated the acts of the national legislature, or temporarily assume the responsibility which the crisis demands. He must authorize the maintenance of civil government in territories acquired by our arms, and judicial proceedings in cases of capture on the high seas, which cannot be brought within the jurisdiction of our established courts. Nor is there any thing in such judicial proceedings which trenches upon the laws of nations; these laws never assume the right to define the powers vested in the executive of a realm. They claim no authority to bring into court the constitutional prerogatives of a prince or of the president of a republic; these are questions which appertain to the forms of government where the acts originate, where the power is exercised, and which must be disposed of as the wisdom of the nation may deem proper. It is enough that national law allows the captor at his peril to burn or sink his prize. Any executive measure to prevent such a precipitate result, and to subject the legality of the capture to the forms of a judicial investigation, is in accordance with every dictate of moral justice, and that strong sense of right which binds every civilized nation in a period of war as well as peace. Nor can the captor, from a want of jurisdiction in the court that determines his case, lose his prize. All the claimant can do is to require him to appear before a court of competent authority, where the case must be examined and decided _de novo_ on its merits. This great principle in maritime jurisprudence has been recognized and confirmed in the decision of the High Court of Admiralty in England. Half a century has rolled over that decision, but its authoritative force remains firm and unshaken as the base of the sea-girt isle.