by the frontiers of every one of them, and the likelihood that in any war some of those countries would be neutrals -there was good reason to suppose could be cut off from a supply of copper or cotton or rubber or oil by a blockade? If there was, could such a cutting off be accomplished so completely and speedily as of itself to be an important factor in ending the war? Would not any war fought under modern conditions be terminated, long before the effects of the blockade made themselves felt, by the killing, wounding and capturing of soldiers-by exhaustion of men?

Take the other instance: France in the Napoleonic wars. If it be true-and it is not admitted-that exhaustion of food and wealth conquered France and not exhaustion of men and weariness of war, still it took twenty years to do it. A modern war we can hardly conceive lasting a quarter of twenty years.

The length of time the blockade had taken to do its work in the past and the certainty in the minds of experts that future wars would be short, the great increase in the extent and ease of interior transportation, the use that had been made in the Japanese war of mines, and the possibilities beginning to be seen of the use of submarines and aeroplanes; such considerations as these might well have persuaded Great Britain that the value of the blockade in the future was doubtful and that the loss she would suffer by the abolishment of the principle of continuous voyage would not be as great as the gain to her in the increased security of her supplies of food and raw materials.

How far the government of which Sir Edward Grey was a member was prepared to go, is shown by his instructions to the chief representative of Great Britain at the Conference of London, which assumed that in the law of blockade the destination of the ship, not of the cargo, determines the right of capture, and by the action of the British delegates in signing with the delegates of all the other great naval powers the Declaration of London, which abolished the doctrine of continuous voyage as applied to the law of

blockade and also as applied to the law of contraband except in the case of absolute contraband and in that of conditional contraband destined for a country without a sea coast. The fact that the Declaration was never ratified cannot be said to indicate that such abolishment was unpopular in Great Britain, as the opposition to it was due chiefly to the fact that it was a step toward making operative the provisions of the second Hague Conference for an international prize court.

But suppose I am wrong in thinking Great Britain would have let the whole doctrine of continuous voyage go by the board; suppose that all Great Britain would have agreed to do was contained in Sir Edward Grey's letter to the British delegates to the second Hague Conference; and suppose the proposal of Great Britain to abandon the principle of contraband had been adopted, or even the alternative proposals which Sir Edward had suggested, that nations should publish during peace a list of articles they would regard as contraband during war, that no change should be made in the list on the outbreak of or during hostilities, and that certain articles, such as foodstuffs and raw materials, should under no circumstances be considered contraband-what momentous consequences might have followed in this war as to the relations not only between the belligerents themselves, but between them and neutrals, and particularly between Germany and the United States and Great Britain and the United States!

I say "might" rather than "would" have followed, because it may be Great Britain would have done under the principle of blockade what she actually did do under the principle of contraband, justifying herself by the conduct of Germany from the moment the war began. But the fact is that no blockade had been declared by Great Britain before the orders in council of March, 1915,5 were issued,

5 When I refer in this paper to the "orders in council," I mean the orders issued March 11, 1915. They were, in substance:

1. No merchant vessel shall be allowed to proceed to any German port;

2. No merchant vessel sailing

and in those orders the word "blockade" was not used. The orders did not profess to proclaim a blockade, nor was it sought to enforce them as a blockade is enforced by confiscation of ship and cargo. The recitals preceding the orders are intended to justify them as reprisals:

"Whereas, the German Government has issued certain orders which, in violation of the usages of war, purport to declare that the waters surrounding the United Kingdom are a military area in which all British and related merchant vessels will be destroyed irrespective of the safety of the lives of the passengers and crews;

"And whereas, such demands on the part of the enemy give to his Majesty the unquestionable right of retaliation,"

Those orders of Germany-by which Great Britain justified her orders-how did Germany justify them and the submarine warfare waged under them in which she claimed a right never before heard of to destroy without warning merchant vessels and their crews? By the announcement of Great Britain that she would seize all grain and flour shipments to Germany. How did Great Britain justify such seizure when the general rule is that foodstuffs are not contraband unless destined for the armed forces or a department of the government of the enemy? By saying that the general rule did not apply, because, in the first place, the German Government had issued a decree placing the grain and flour of the Empire under government control, and in the second, because "the ground for drawing a distinction between foodstuffs intended for the civil population and those for the armed forces of the enemy's government disappears when the distinction between the civil population and the armed forces itself disappears;" and, therefore, grain and flour were contraband.

So that on the face of the record the British orders

from any German port shall be allowed to proceed on a voyage with any goods on board laden at such port;

3. Every merchant vessel sailing to a port other than a German port and carrying goods with an enemy destination or which are enemy property may be required to

discharge such goods in a British or allied port;

4. Every merchant vessel sailing from a port other than a German port and having on board goods of enemy origin or enemy property may be required to discharge such goods in a British or allied port.

in council rest upon the order of Germany declaring a submarine warfare, and that order rests upon the declaration of England that grain and flour destined for Germany would be seized because they were contraband—a resting place which would not have existed if the principle of contraband had been abolished at The Hague Conference.

The result is the same if Great Britain's attempt to prevent grain and flour from reaching Germany was not the real cause for the latter's submarine warfare, and Germany was in fact much more concerned about the danger of being cut off from copper, petrol, rubber and numerous other things necessary for military arms and operations; for it was by the application of the principle of contraband that Great Britain seized such shipments to neutral ports where the ultimate destination was for Germany.

In preventing goods from reaching Germany through Rotterdam or other neutral ports on the ground that they were contraband, England was not only doing what she had claimed in the Boer War she had the right to do, and what Italy had done in the war with Tripoli; but what she had an exact precedent for in the decision of our Supreme Court in "The Springbok" case and what Germany and the United States knew she claimed the right to do when they voted against her proposal to abolish the principle of contraband. But if in 1907 those nations had accepted the proposal and by their united efforts the law of contraband had been abolished, then in case she had attempted at the outbreak of the war to exercise under the law of blockade the right to seize goods destined for Germany through the neutral ports of Holland, Denmark and Italy, she would have had to face the fact that it was the opinion of the great majority of international jurists not only of the Continent but of Great Britain that there was no such right; that her great admiralty Judge, Sir William Scott, had denied that right; that in the United States the decision of the Supreme Court, which was precisely in point in her favor under the law of contraband, was precisely in point against her under

the law of blockade; and she would have had to face the technical claim that as she could not blockade the Baltic ports of Germany against Sweden and Norway and Denmark, the blockade would not be an effective or impartial one. Above all, she would have had to face the charge that after having solemnly made at The Hague Conference a proposal which had been accepted as a reality, she had, at the first opportunity, treated it as a sham.

All the arguments which she makes today to justify the orders in council she might, to be sure, have made then to justify the application of the doctrine of continuous voyage to the law of blockade. She might have said to us then as she says in substance today:

"You say that Great Britain has no right to arrest neutral ships sailing between neutral ports on the ground that their cargoes come from or are going to Germany. Why not? In the Civil War you arrested neutral ships on a voyage from one neutral port to another and condemned them and their cargoes even when the cargoes were non-contraband. You answer, 'Yes, but we did it only when the goods were to go on from the neutral port to the South by sea, and not when they were to go on from the neutral port by land.' But what difference in principle is there? Why should you be allowed to blockade Bermuda, and we not be allowed to blockade Rotterdam? Great Britain is an island. The only communication between it and neutral ports is, therefore, by sea. Every other country in Europe has communication with neutral ports by land. "Under your distinction nearly all the neutral ports on the Continent of Europe may be open to non-contraband goods destined to our enemies and every one of them closed to such goods destined to us; our enemies may blockade all the neutral countries in Europe and we may not blockade any, except, perhaps, Sweden and Norway. There is no justice in a distinction that works so unfairly. If any case in the United States or in Great Britain has made such a distinction it should be disregarded in international law just as in municipal law a case is overruled which cannot be sustained on principle. There is one principle and one alone on which can be supported what you did in your Civil War under the law of blockade. That principle, 'which is fundamental and which has obtained universal recognition, is that by means of blockade a belligerent is entitled to cut off by effective means the sea-borne commerce of his enemy.' And on that principle can be supported likewise everything we have done or intend to do."

But to make today such an argument, whether it be sound

Letter of Sir Edward Grey, published in American newspapers

August 4, 1915.