Chapter 5 - Page 2

their opinions; for education,
years, and experience, had taught them to discriminate justly.

"As respects the course of Captain Truck, in refusing to permit the cutter
to board him, he is probably a better judge than any of us," Mr. Effingham
observed with gentlemanly reserve--"for he must better understand the
precise position of his ship at the time; but concerning the want of right
in a foreign vessel of war to carry this ship into port in a time of
profound peace, when sailing on the high seas, as will soon be the case
with the Montauk,--admitting that she is not there at present,--I should
think there can be no reasonable doubt. The dispute, if there is to be
any, has now to become matter of negotiation; or redress must be sought
through the general agents of the two nations, and not taken by the
inferior officers of either party. The instant Montauk reaches the public
highway of nations, she is, within the exclusive jurisdiction of the
country under whose flag she legally sails."

"Vattel, to the back-bone!" said the captain, giving a nod of approbation,
again clearing the end of his cigar.

Now, John Effingham was a man of strong feelings, which is often but
another word for a man of strong prejudices; and he had been educated
between thirty or forty years before, which is saying virtually, that he
was educated under the influence of the British opinions, that then
weighed (and many of which still weigh) like an incubus on the national
interests of America. It is true, Mr. Effingham was in all senses the
contemporary, as he had been the school-fellow, of his cousin; that they
loved each other as brothers, had the utmost reliance on each other's
principles in the main, thought alike in a thousand things, and yet, in
the particular of English domination, it was scarcely possible for one man
to resemble another less than the widowed kinsman resembled the bachelor.

Edward Effingham was a singularly just-minded man, and having succeeded at
an early age to his estate, he had lived many years in that intellectual
retirement which, by withdrawing him from the strifes of the world, had
left a cultivated sagacity to act freely on a natural disposition. At the
period when the entire republic was, in substance, exhibiting the
disgraceful picture of a nation torn by adverse factions, that had their
origin in interests alien to its own; when most were either Englishmen or
Frenchmen, he had remained what nature, the laws and reason intended him
to be, an American. Enjoying the _otium cum dignitate_ on his hereditary
estate, and in his hereditary abode, Edward Effingham, with little
pretensions to greatness, and with many claims to goodness, had hit the
line of truth which so