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MARITIME RIGHTS.

back to any period anterior to the great revolutionary period, was by no means different from the English law in the sense M. Drouhyn de Luys supposes; and that, if it differed from it at all, it differed in the sense of being more stringent; for, up to 1744, as we have seen, the French not only confiscated the enemy's goods but the neutral ship also which carried them, and they likewise confiscated the neutral goods found on board an enemy's ship; and it was plain that no law could be gathered from the French practice during the revolutionary period, nor from the Berlin and Milan Decrees, as these ordinances were notoriously directed solely against the maritime power of England, and were the result of caprice and violence, and not deductions from any principle at all. But as the maritime traditions of modern France were chiefly if not exclusively framed in connection with ideas of wars against England, it became a tradition with them that it was