Albert Beveridge: “American riflemen of the West and South had overwhelmed the flower of all the armies of Europe.”

But an act universally recognized as criminal, such as robbery, murder, and the like, "is an offense against the community of nations.

Through nearly all the important legislation and diplomacy of those stirring and interpretative years ran, with ever increasing clearness, the dividing line of Nationalism as against localism.

Indeed, he thought them only "an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution.

Any nation, however, may by statute declare an act to be piratical which is not so by the law of nations; and such an act is punishable only by that particular state and not by other governments.