Piracy there has been: no doubt of that.

At ten years of age we are all quite sure that piracy is a finer calling than trade, and the pirate a finer fellow than the Shylock who owns the shipwhich, indeed, he may well be.

So far as South Carolina and Georgia are concerned, the law declaring the slave-trade piracy is a dead letter; and the sentiment which prevails toward it in Charleston and Savannah is an imperfect index of that which is manifested at Salt Lake City toward all national authority.

Piracy is an offence against the universal law of society, a pirate being according to Sir Edward Coke, stis humani generis.

Piracy is robbery at sea, performed not by an individual but by a ship's crew.

and piracy and profligacy are at all times, and especially nowadays, expensive amusements, and often require a good private fortunerare among poets.

Piracy was his life; he knew and cared for nothing else.

Barbary piracy was a protective tax in favor of British bottoms.

But as we grow up (which some of the best of us never do) we realise that piracy is not the best way to establish the ownership of cargoes, any more than the ordeal is the way to settle cases at law, or the rack of proving a dogma, or the Spanish American method the way to settle differences between Liberals and Conservatives.