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xx PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN

to be sublimely ignorant of what the great dramatist
has written of the comparative value of one’s purse
and good name, treat a blackmailer as a person to he
dealt with most tenderly—witness the mild sentences
given to Cook and Mrs. Hirsch. And our national
legislature has made it still easier for this class of
blackmailers by enacting a law under which, as con-
strued by our highest Court, a notorious prostitute
who induces a boy of 17 to pay her fare on a steam-
boat or railroad or street car, may, if the youth re-
fuses to accede to her demands, actually pose in the
courts as a White Slave and have him sent to the peni-
tentiary for a longer term than the average sentence
of a burglar, a foot-pad or an assassin,

The six Spanish pirates who were hanged in the
city of Boston (Pedro Gibert and others, p. 699) had
stopped on the high seas an American merchant ves-
sel and had appropriated all the specie they found
there. But the merchantman returned safely to its
home port and no man or woman or child lost his Jife.
What a trifling offense was this compared to the
crimes of German pirates who have in the past four
years sent to the bottom of the sea hundreds of peace-
ful vessels and murdered thousands of innocent sail-
ors, passengers, women and little children. Tried for
their lives by the admiralty law Gibert and his asso-
ciates bad no defense; and when after the war the
German pirates are tried by the rules of International
law what defense will they be able to set up? Inter-
national law is simply the unwritten and written law
of the nations. It is the sum of those usages which
civilized people have decided to be binding an them in
their intercourse one with another; and it has its
rules for times of war as well as for times of peace.
Just as the common law in England and America is

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