iii (1887), pp.

351-354, can scarcely be reconciled with her recent action.
But a still stronger argument against the inclusion of cotton in the list of "absolute" contraband is that this is wholly without precedent.
It has, indeed, been alleged that cotton was declared to be "contraband" by the United States in their Civil War.

The Federal proclamations will, however, be searched in vain for anything of the kind.

The mistake is due to an occasional loose employment of the term, as descriptive of articles found by an invader in an enemy's territory, which, although the property of private, and even neutral, individuals, happen to be so useful for the purposes of the war as to be justly confiscated.

That this was so will appear from an attentive reading of the case of _Mrs.
Alexander's Cotton_, in 1861 (2 Wallace, 404), and of the arguments in the claim made by Messrs.