s between France and Great Britain, in force at the signature
of ours, we could not have been permitted to arm in the ports of France.
She could not then have meant in this article to give us such a right.
She has manifested the same sense of it in her subsequent treaty with
England, made eight years after the date of ours, stipulating in
the sixteenth article of it, as in our twenty-second, that foreign
privateers, not being subjects of either crown, should not arm against
either in the ports of the other. If this had amounted to an affirmative
stipulation that the subjects of the other crown might arm in her
ports against us, it would have been in direct contradiction to her
twenty-second article with us. So that to give to these negative
stipulations an affirmative effect, is to render them inconsistent with
each other, and with good faith; to give them only their negative and
natural effect, is to reconcile them to one another and to good faith,
and is clearly to adopt the sense in which France herself has expounded
them. We may justly conclude then, that the article only obliges us to
refuse this right, in the present case, to Great Britain and the other
enemies of France. It does not go on to give it to France, either
expressly or by implication. We may then refuse it. And since we are
bound by treaty to refuse it to the one party, and are free to refuse
it to the other, we are bound by the laws of neutrality to refuse it
to that other. The aiding either party then with vessels, arms, or men,
being unlawful by the law of nations, and not rendered lawful by the
treaty, it is made a question whether our citizens, joining in these
unlawful enterprises, may be punished.

The United States being in a state of peace with most of the belligerent
powers by treaty, and with all of them by the laws of nature, murders
and robberies committed by our citizens within our territory, or on the
high seas, on those with whom we are so at peace, are punishable equally
as if committed on our own inhabitants. If I might venture to reason a
little formally, without being charged with running into 'subtleties and
aphorisms,' I would say, that if one citizen has a right to go to war of
his own authority, every citizen has the same. If every citizen has that
right, then the nation (which is composed of all its citizens) has a
right to go to war, by the authority of its individual citizens. But
this is not true either on the general princip