It was not in any sense an act of war, but mere and open piracy, killing for the love of killing.

Of a surety I fear not lest these fellows should succeed in injuring me by their miserable piracies; but it grieveth me deeply that, while I live, they should have been nigh to touching at this shore, and I am a prey to violent sorrow when I foresee what evils they will heap upon my descendants and their people.'

At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy."

Another object she had in view was the suppression of that horrible piracy which then raged in the Hellenic seas.

We were very wrong indeed when we took part in preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of Frederick the Great.

The inhabitants of the cinque-ports, during the present dissolution of government, betook themselves to the most licentious piracy, preyed on the ships of all nations, threw the mariners into the sea, and, by these practices, soon banished all merchants from the English coasts and harbours.

This, of course, was pure piracy; the motto of Prussia for some time had been that piracy pays.

Although our expedition, cooperating with an invigorated administration of the government of the island of Cuba, and with the corresponding active exertions of a British naval force in the same seas, have almost entirely destroyed the unlicensed piracies from that island, the success of our exertions has not been equally effectual to suppress the same crime, under other pretenses and colors, in the neighboring island of Porto Rico.

" When poor Otway's "unpardonable piracy," in taking part of this play from "Romeo and Juliet," was reprobated so severely, the critic might have done him the justice to mention, that, instead of attempting to pass off the borrowed beauties as his own, he, in the prologue, fully avowed his obligations.

The Civil War brought these courtly piracies to an end, and the decay of the Spanish power drew the more turbulent spirits of Europe and America to the Spanish main, so that for a time there was a diminution of European piracy in Indian waters.

The catalogue of provocations grew daily, and daily bred anger, but our temper held until in February of 1917, when Germany proclaimed unrestricted piracy by submarines, and under the thin pretext of starving out the British Isles, American and other ships were destroyed with all on board, wholesale.

I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857, the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vesselsthe fastest and most easily managed ships in the age before steamterrorized the whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their inhabitants.