There may often be the best reasons for a sovereign's refusing to allow of a RESIDENT minister at his court; a practice, so general in the present day, but totally unknown to the ages of antiquity. IV. As to the personal exemption of ambassadors from arrest, constraint, or violence of any kind, it is a subject of some difficulty to determine, owing to the varieties of opinion entertained by the most celebrated writers on the question. In the consideration of this matter, our attention is directed in the first place to the personal privileges and exemptions of ambassadors themselves, and next to those of their attendants, and their goods. With respect to their persons, some writers are of opinion, that it is ONLY from UNJUST VIOLENCE, and ILLEGAL CONSTRAINT, that the law of nations protects ambassadors. For they imagine that their privileges are to be explained according to the common principles of the law of nature. Others again suppose that ambassadors are not amenable to punishment for ALL offences, but only for such as amount to a transgression of the law of NATIONS, the principles of which are of such general extent, as to include the law of nature: consequently there can be no offences for which an ambassador is not punishable, except for those actions that are made such by the positive rules of MUNICIPAL or CIVIL LAW. Others again consider these public representatives of states and crowned heads, as only liable to punishment for offences affecting the dignity or governments of the sovereigns to whom they are sent. While, on the other hand, there are some writers who maintain that for any state to punish an ambassador for ANY CRIME WHATEVER is highly dangerous to the independence of foreign powers; but that all offenders of that description ought to be left to the laws of their respective countries, to be punished or not according to their deserts, upon due complaint being made to the sovereigns by whom they were sent.