4.
17
when
With respect to the third point, both the visiting of British and Chinese ships occasioning much delay, the Lords Commissioners do not object to directing Naval Officers to perform that duty, and if they shall find the Law to have been neglected, to send home a certificate to that effect under the 15th section of the Act. But their Lordships object, as they understand their letter, to impose on Naval Officers the responsibility of seizing the ship in case she should either have no Emigration papers on board, or should produce papers that were evidently forged or fraudulently altered.
4. The proposal to attach the penalty of forfeiture of the ship to serious offences against the Law originated, as it will be remembered, with the Law Officers of the Crown, and was repeated and insisted on in their letter to the Foreign Office of 17th April 1855. It was subsequently approved by the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade, and was embodied in the Bill introduced into Parliament. But in the House of Lords, the Bill was so far modified as to restrict this penalty to cases in which a ship had no Emigration papers on board.