The Freedom of the Seas

THERE has been freedom of the seas in peace-time for nearly three hundred years. Early in the seventeenth century Grotius wrote his Mare Liberum, the ’Free Sea,’ against the pretensions of the Portuguese to close the Eastern seas to the traffic of other nations. His theme was that there could be no territorial sovereignty of the sea as there was of the land; the argument was Byron’s apostrophe, —

set out in legal form and phrasing. Elizabeth’s sea captains had used other means to combat the very similar pretensions of the Spanish in the Western seas; but when Grotius wrote, the dominant spirit in England’s foreign policy was trade jealousy of the Dutch. Accordingly, John Selden was put up to answer Grotius, which he did in his Mare Clausum, the ‘Closed Sea,’ asserting British territorial sovereignty, not only over the Narrows of the North Sea and the Channel, but over the whole of the waters from Norway to Finisterre. For a long time Great Britain claimed that ceremonial honors should be paid to her flag in these waters; but the view of Grotius prevailed, and it is now undisputed law that there can be no ownership or sovereignty of the sea. The doctrine of the three-mile limit is all that remains of Selden’s learned argument and of the pretensions of the Spanish and Portuguese.

But the freedom that is now in question is freedom in war-time. If there were ownership of the seas, the owner would do his best to keep the operations of war away from his property, and if that owner were a neutral, belligerents would have no more right to carry on war over his sea than on land subject to territorial sovereignty. As it is, however, war always sets up a conflict between two easements over the sea — between the freedom of the belligerent to carry on his war and the freedom of the neutral to carry on his trade. Thus, freedom of the sea, like the freedom of the individual, necessarily implies some limitation of itself as a necessary condition of its own realization. In morals, philosophers will sometimes define freedom as a voluntary submission to rules of conduct recognized as good, and in this sense St. Paul, for example, speaks of the liberty to which Christians are called. In politics again, one man’s freedom, unless it is regulated by the sense of duty to his fellow citizens, is only another man’s bondage. Similarly, we do not get far in our examination of this freedom of the seas before discovering that no meaning whatever is to be attached to the phrase except in the terms of submission to a law recognized as fair and for the general good. It follows, further, that the law of which freedom is the acceptance is not a fixed and stationary conception, but one that is constantly developing. It changes with changing political ideas, and even with the progress of mechanical invention. But each change should mark an advancement to rules that are for the greater good of the world, an elimination of some purely selfish interest, and the substitution in its place of something that makes for justice between all.

The object of this article is to turn over the ideal of the law at sea (which is freedom) as it presents itself to Englishmen of liberal mind. It is not easy, in moments of great anxiety and even danger like these, to keep a sure hold of the ideals of humanity and to cast the mind forward to the time when there will be some chance of advancing them; but the attempt must be made. For war would be even greater unreason than it is, unless we keep steadily in mind the processes of construction that must follow the destruction. And in analyzing the conception of freedom at sea, Englishmen are encouraged by the thought that in a wise and liberal solution of its problems lies the best hope of establishing the friendship of Great Britain and the United States on an unshakable foundation.

I

‘The Government of the United States and the Imperial Government,’ wrote President Wilson in his third note to Germany on the sinking of the Lusitania, ‘ contending for the same object, long stood together in urging the very principles on which the Government of the United States now insists. They are both contending for the freedom of the seas.’

The allusion in this remarkable passage seems to be to Franklin’s treaty, concluded in 1785 between the United States and Prussia, which provided that in any war between the two countries, the property of Prussian subjects and United States citizens should be exempt from capture at sea. Evidently President Wilson regards this exemption of private property from capture as an essential to the law of freedom, which he wishes to have established at sea, and Germany has naturally made the most of this old treaty and of the long dispute between England and the United States over the law of the sea. Englishmen who are wise never forget that the last war with the United States arose out of certain incidents of what Americans regarded as the British maritime tyranny. There is even a close resemblance between the arguments of Count Bernstorff in this war and some passages in the decrees of Napoleon establishing the so-called Continental system against Great Britain.

‘This decree’ (so run the closing words in the preamble of Napoleon’s Berlin Decree, issued after the battle of Jena in 1806) ‘shall be considered as the fundamental law of the Empire, until England has acknowledged that the rights of war are the same on land as on sea; that it [war] cannot be extended to any private property whatever; nor to persons who are not military; and until the right of blockade be restrained to fortified places, actually invested by competent forces.’

In all her negotiations with the United States, Germany has constantly striven to put herself in the position thus defined by Napoleon, hoping at first, no doubt, actually to embroil the United States with Britain and to have a second war of 1812 on the centenary of the conclusion of the first, or, failing that, at any rate to obtain the assistance of the United States in loosening the tightness of the British blockade. Wise Englishmen do not forget these and other historical parallels between the struggle to-day against Germany and that against Napoleon more than a century ago.

But interesting as the points of resemblance are, the points of difference are still more important. It is true that the maritime policy of Prussia in the eighteenth century was in close accord with that of the United States, whereas that of England was at a constant variance which culminated in the War of 1812. The reasons, however, were economic rather than in the strict sense political. It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century all nations which had colonies regarded them as commercial appanages. ‘Commercial monopoly,’ says Montesquieu, ‘is the leading principle of colonial intercourse.’ By decisions of the British prize courts in the Seven Years’ War, it was laid down that a trade forbidden to foreigners in peace could not, at the convenience of a belligerent, be extended to neutral foreigners in war. That is to say, France at war could not allow the United States to conduct a trade with her colonies which she refused to her in peace-time.

This rule, the so-called Rule of 1756, was rational enough as between the various states of Europe, all of which regarded colonies as close commercial monopolies, but was inequitable as applied to the United States, which had no colonies, and, moreover, living apart from Europe as she did, regarded such restrictions on commercial development as an infringement of those American ideals which afterwards came to be embodied in the Monroe Doctrine. Prussia, too, had no colonies, and it was because the Rule prevented her from obtaining in war the commercial advantage that she would otherwise have had as a neutral that she was found pleading alongside of the United States for the principle that the flag covered the cargo. But this association was purely casual, and its point against England depended on fiscal views of colonial commerce which England long ago discarded. The Franklin treaty, therefore, implied no real community of ideals between the United States and Germany, but was a merely temporary connection due to views on the nature of the relations between the mother country and the colonies, of which the British Empire is a living contradiction splendidly embodied.

The main cause of the War of 1812 was England’s exercise of the right of search in order to impress seamen serving on American vessels, who by English law were still British subjects; and there is no Englishman who does not regret that war, and regard it as a disfiguring misprint on the page of history. While it is true that the war could never have arisen but for Great Britain’s refusal to accept the doctrine that the flag covered the cargo, the cause that produced it has long ceased to be operative. If there ever was any fund of sympathy between Germany and the United States due to the fact that Prussia, as a member of the Armed Neutrality, had urged views of the rights of neutrals of which the United States approved, and for which she may perhaps be said to have fought in the War of 1812, it was dissolved in 1856 when England signed the Declaration of Paris. For that Declaration took both from the principles of the Armed Neutralities and from British practice the parts that were most favorable to neutrals. From the one it took the principle that the flag covered the cargo, and from the other the principle that neutral property was exempt from capture even under a belligerent flag.

If England had ever abused her power at sea to oppress neutrals, this Declaration was a complete renunciation of her past errors, and gave her the just right to boast that henceforth her naval power was to be regarded as the champion of neutral right in war-time. It was the greatest surrender of belligerent power ever voluntarily made by a nation. It is true that she did not go as far as the United States would have wished and abandon the right of capture of private property other than contraband at sea; but that was not, after all, a neutral grievance, for neutral ships are not liable to capture except for breach of blockade or contraband regulations. To neutrals the surrender of Great Britain was absolutely complete. Nor was the Declaration signed under mere temporary impulse. Its rules were embodied permanently in British naval policy, and by the Declaration of London, more than fifty years later, were boldly — perhaps rashly — extended, and still in the same direction, namely, to secure for neutrals a greater freedom on the seas.

Nor was this all. Soon after the Declaration of Paris was signed, a movement began in England for extending to noncombatants among the belligerents immunity from the operations of war, and for exempting all belligerent as well as neutral private property at sea (except contraband) from capture. The movement divided opinion very curiously in England. It was supported and opposed from both political parties. In favor were the men of the Manchester school; against, the philosophic Radicals; among Conservatives again the bureaucratic type tended to oppose and the individualistic to favor the reform. The lawyers, on the whole, supported the reform: Lord Loreburn, exLord Chancellor, and the last two Attorneys-General, Sir John Simon and Sir F. E. Smith, have both argued very forcibly for it. Further, Sir Edward Grey, in his instructions to the British delegates at the last Hague Conference, made it quite clear that if Continental Powers would consent to a reduction of their armaments on land England on her part would forgo the right of capture at sea.

It is not too much to say, therefore, that just before the war there were great hopes that England might take the lead in establishing the freedom of the seas both in peace and in war. Had Germany on her element of the land shown the same openness of mind as England on the sea, the causes of the plague that is now ravaging Europe might have been removed. Even as it was, the contrast between England’s treatment of neutral rights at sea and Germany’s treatment of them on land was sufficiently startling. Germany began the war by invading Belgium, of whose neutrality she was a guarantor. England at the beginning of the war accepted the regulations of the Declaration of London, although, as that Declaration had been rejected by Parliament, it was not legally binding upon her, and although she knew that it must gravely hamper her in a war with Germany. There is no conceivable motive for this forbearance except her respect for the rights of neutrals. The government, which has been attacked at home for this forbearance by men heated with the struggle against Germany, has some claim to the consideration of neutrals; and it may be doubted whether it has had its full due from them. The just standards of judgment in international affairs are not absolute, but take into account all the attendant circumstances and conditions. England may not have given as much as all neutrals desired by the Declarations of Paris and London. But whatever she gave — and it was a great deal — she gave out of what she regarded, rightly or wrongly, as her most valuable and remunerative capital investment. For the average Englishman is ultraconservative in everything that relates to sea and sea-power, and any abatement that he consents to make of it is evidence of a goodwill many times the intrinsic value of the concession. By the beginning of the war, therefore, England felt that she had not only wiped out the past which had led to her old quarrel with the United States, but had accumulated a fund of goodwill on which she could draw in a struggle with Germany which, so far as she was concerned, she had been taught to think must he decided mainly by the exercise of sea-power.

One amendment she did make in the provisions of the Declaration of London at the very outset of the war. Whereas under the Declaration of London, the doctrine of continuous voyage, under which a belligerent could seize goods consigned to a neutral port if there was evidence that their ultimate destination was the enemy, had been restricted to absolute contraband, at the outset of the war England announced that she meant to apply it to conditional contraband also. The necessity for this change was very regrettable, but inexorable. Its effect was that all imports of articles not on the free list into neutral countries were liable to retention and search, and, if it should be found that they were intended for the use of the enemy’s armed forces, to confiscation. Obviously that meant a great extension of the interference with neutral shipping. But what was the alternative? Under the original rules no commercial blockade of Germany was possible, for she would always have been able to import everything that she wanted (except absolute contraband) through the neutral countries of Holland, Denmark, and Sweden.

The changes which England made in the Declaration of London were no more than were necessary to redress what would otherwise have been to her the great disadvantage, so far as her supplies were concerned, of being an island and not a Continental state. The changes in the conditions of war that had taken place since the struggle with Napoleon had all been to the disadvantage of island sea-power. Before railways were made, to blockade the ports of a Continental country was to cut off its supplies. Not so now, with every country in Europe connected with every other by railway; and it was manifestly inequitable that Germany, which had invaded one neutral country for her military advantage, should use the rights of other neutral countries like Holland and Denmark to shelter her from England’s sea-power. Further, as Sir Edward Grey pointed out in one of his dispatches, the Continental system of conscription made the distinction between supplies destined for civilian and for belligerent use unreal, and even the best will could hardly carry it out in practice without great risk of unfairness to the sea-power.

Even with these changes in the Declaration of London, the conditions were greatly in favor of Germany. She could import in neutral ships into her own ports all the articles on the free list, which included some materials like cotton which were of great value for war purposes. Sheltered behind neutral countries, she was free from blockade. But she was not content with this amazing good fortune. From the very beginning of the war she attempted to establish a paper blockade of British ports by mines, and at the end of October, 1914, a great liner, the Olympic, crowded with Americans, narrowly escaped being sunk off the north coast of Ireland. The position, therefore, was this: when it was to her military advantage Germany was to violate neutral rights, as she did by the invasion of Belgium; when it was to the advantage of her defense from blockade, Germany was to have the shelter of neutral rights; and, again, when it was to her naval advantage, she was to be free to establish a paper blockade of British ports, using the neutral flag for the purpose of escaping observation, and to drown neutrals on ships that ran on the mines she had surreptitiously laid. This was freedom of the seas with a vengeance — freedom for Germany but for no one else. No nation, least of all Great Britain, to whom sea-power was as the breath of her nostrils, could acquiesce; and at the beginning of November the North Sea was declared a closed military area, except for a narrow passage in the Strait of Dover.

II

This was admittedly a reversion to the Mare Clausum, but one that Grotius himself might have defended; for there seemed no other way of protecting neutral life and trade. The only solid argument ever advanced for the doctrine of territorial sovereignty at sea was that, if a nation used her seapower to keep the sea free from pirates, she thereby acquired certain rights in those waters. On the same principle Great Britain, now engaged in preventing a blockade by mines which threatened not only her own belligerent interests but neutral life and commerce alike, might claim to be at any rate in the position of custodian trustee of the sea-area of the war, and to have the right, not, of course, of prohibiting access, but of laying down rules on which that right of access might be enjoyed with comparative safety.

Another analogy is to be found in the claims put forward by the United States in the Behring Sea controversy. In effect, the United States then asserted the right to treat a vast area of the Pacific off Alaska as territorial waters, and the Arbitration Court, while rejecting their claim of sovereignty, acknowledged that the United States were morally entitled to an agreement with all other nations interested that should put an end to the danger of the extermination of the seals. One of the clauses of such agreement provided for a close time for sealing. On the same principle the partial closing of the North Sea by the British, though technically a breach of the freedom of the seas, was defensible as a necessary measure for preserving that freedom.

The German answer was the submarine blockade, which in its least unfavorable aspect was a gross violation of the provision of the Declaration of Paris that blockades, to be binding, must be ‘effective,’— that is to say, ‘maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coasts of the enemy’ (which the German submarines never were), — and in its worst aspect was an invasion of American rights at sea no less heinous as regards the State and no less cruel in its blind choice of innocent victims than the German invasion of Belgium. There is no need here to elaborate the case against the submarine blockade, which has been put by President Wilson with all the moderation of strength. The sole contentious point is whether Great Britain, in the Orders in Council of March, took the wisest measures to protect her own and neutral rights. The governing fact of the situation was that Germany, who was thus attacking neutral rights in order to injure Great Britain, was sheltering behind neutral rights in order to escape injury from her sea-power. Which set of neutral rights was the more valuable — the rights behind which Germany was sheltering, including the right to make profit by trading with Germany, or the right which Germany was attacking by her submarine campaign ?

The British policy, stripped of its technicalities, was this: In order to defend her own and neutral rights she in effect asked neutrals to forgo their right of profitable trade with Germany, a right which they would not have had if Germany, like England, had been an island, because in that case she would have been completely blockaded, and which they owed solely to the fact that Germany had land frontiers with neutral powers which could not be blockaded; a right moreover which Germany proposed to use solely for her own advantage, and so far from making any return for this use was prepared to violate without scruple, as her submarine campaign showed.

Holland had no difficulty in making her choice. The United States hesitated. It may be that the dead hand of the War of 1812 was still on the policy of the country, and that the government, having at some critical moments of her history come to regard Great Britain as the arch-opponent of freedom on the seas, failed to recognize the real nature of the change that had come over the British attitude towards neutral rights at sea. The influence of tradition — perhaps because it is weak in the social and business life of American citizens — often surprises Europe by its strength in certain departments of government. It may be that unofficial opinion in England, by its somewhat unimaginative handling of the exceedingly delicate problems of domestic policy which the war had made for America, and by well-meant but clumsy efforts to persuade her to take the side of the Allies in the war, had actually hindered the recognition of the essential community of interest between the United States and the Allies. It may be, again, that the agitation which had sprung up in England against what was regarded as the excessive mildness of the government’s blockade policy prevented our official diplomacy from making certain concessions to the American point of view that might have led to closer coöperation between the two governments; or, again, that the form of the British government’s answer to the German submarine blockade showed too little appreciation of the forms of law and of the difficulties in which neutrals were placed. Certain it is, however, that the American government seemed to English people for a time to be unduly sensitive about British infringement of neutral rights and unduly considerate of the much graver violations of which Germany had been guilty.

In one of President Wilson’s Lusitania notes there was a passage already quoted which gave great pain to English Liberals. He said that the United States and Germany had long stood together in their advocacy of the freedom of the seas, and invited the Imperial government to coöperate with the United States now for the same ideal— a passage which seemed to English people, bruised as they were in the terrible conflict, unnecessarily to rub into sore places the lessons of the War of 1812. But, whatever be the inner diplomatic history of this time, the American government last autumn gave Germany a chance such as few nations have ever had and rejected. She had only to keep the promises made by Count Bernstorff last September and refrain from torpedoing liners without notice (surely a cheap price for such a prize), in order to secure, not merely the continued neutrality of America, but a public certificate that she and not England was the friend of the freedom of the seas. The promises were broken, and the sinking of the Sussex and a number of outrages on neutrals were her answer, which amounted to a definite rejection of America’s extremely generous offers.

Never has so low a value been put on the friendship of a great nation. Nor could it be said that the government misrepresented the people of Germany in this matter. When Von Tirpitz resigned, the people of Germany feared that it might portend, not further concessions to the United States, but the keeping of the promises already made, and at once there was a combination of parties in the Reichstag to insist that Germany should maintain the attacks with undiminished rigor. That was an advertisement to the world that Germany was insincere in her profession of attachment to the principle of the freedom of the seas. As well might she claim that she was championing the cause of neutrals when she invaded Belgium and burnt Louvain, as that she was working for the freedom of the seas in drowning American citizens and sinking Dutch and Norwegian ships. Whatever doubt there may have been before, from April of this year it became clear that in so far as the maintenance of the freedom of the seas was a cardinal object of America’s policy, the best chance of furthering this ideal lay with England and her Allies.

III

The ideal of the freedom of the sea as it presents itself to advanced American thought includes two reforms. The first is the abolition of the capture of private property at sea; the second the abolition of commercial blockade. The first is one of the traditional objects of the United States’ policy, and their representatives have never missed an opportunity of urging it at every international conference at which the laws of naval war have been discussed; and latterly the attitude of official England has not been one of uncompromising opposition. Sir Edward Grey, in his instructions to the British delegates at the Second Hague Conference, said that if Continental powers would agree to restrict their armaments on land, England might agree to forgo the right of capture at sea. The assumption was that the right of capture was a valuable weapon to the strongest naval power, which it could not safely surrender so long as Continental powers kept up their enormous land forces. It was, he said, our only offensive weapon. Mr. Arthur Balfour, in an otherwise admirable recent statement on the freedom of the seas, made the same assumption. In estimating the strength of the obstacles to a complete agreement between British and American policy at sea, this assumption will need to be examined in the light of the experience gained in this war.

Again, the second element in the ideal of freedom at sea is the abolition of commercial blockade. How far this reform is part of the official policy of the American government is uncertain; its own practice in the Civil War was rigorous enough. Yet there would seem to be no alternative to the practice of the British government in this war but the complete abolition of commercial blockade. The right of blockade is worse than valueless to an island power if it can be enforced against itself and cannot be enforced against a Continental enemy with neutral frontiers. Unless, therefore, neutral countries voluntarily consent to stop through traffic to the enemy, as Holland has done in this war, they must logically press for the abolition of commercial blockade.

To recognize the right of blockade and at the same time to refuse the cooperation which alone can make it practicable against a Continental country is in effect though not in intention to favor the Continental power at the expense of the island. If, therefore, the freedom of the seas precludes such interference with neutral commerce as Holland has consented to in this war (and President Wilson has seemed to argue that it should), it necessarily involves the abolition of commercial blockade. We are getting very near to Napoleon’s policy expressed in the preamble to the Berlin Decree, that war should not be extended to any private property whatever, or to persons who are not military; and that blockade should be restricted to fortified places actually invested by competent forces.

It is too early yet to generalize on the lessons of the war, but it may be doubted whether the general assumption when the war began, that the right of capture is an advantage to the power that is strongest at sea, would now be accepted. Except by submarine, Britain’s sea-power has not been seriously challenged. But the losses of her mercantile marine have been much greater than the enemy’s. No doubt the loss to Germany of the earnings of her fleet by its being laid up idle in her own or neutral ports has not been negligible; but, except in so far as it has been drawn upon to meet current expenses, there has been no such destruction of her shipping capital as has taken place in England. It might be difficult to conceive a war in which the enemy’s merchant ships, though his battle fleets were defeated or shut up in harbor, still kept the seas and went about carrying goods and earning dividends; but, paradoxical as that state of things might be, the paradox of a great naval power losing millions of tons of merchant shipping while its fleets maintain an unchallenged supremacy is greater still. The plain fact which will be generally recognized in England after the war, and is admitted by many now, is that the right of capture must inevitably hurt most of all the nation which has the greater shipping and which, owing to its island position and its inability to support itself, must keep its ships at sea or perish.

And has the right of commercial blockade been of much real value to Great Britain? This, too, is open to grave doubt. A commercial blockade would bring England to her knees in a very short time. But Germany could hold out for a long time, even though nothing at all reached her through her own ports or through the ports of adjacent neutral countries. And the same is true of nearly every other country in Europe. Indeed, if the struggle is to be prolonged, the cessation of foreign trade may be a positive advantage to a nation with great internal resources that make her temporarily more or less independent of foreign trade. A country which has the lives of all its male subjects of military age at its disposal has no difficulty in inducing them to take paper money; and if there are no foreign exchanges to be considered, paper is as good as gold as a means of purely internal exchange — so long, of course, as the credit of the government holds. In this war Great Britain has actually had to inflict on herself some of the evils of a partial blockade of the imports of certain articles, mainly because she was short of shipping tonnage, but also, no doubt, for financial reasons. A blockade, by abolishing the importation of articles of luxury, may thus ease the financial strain of such a war as this, and it is certainly arguable that, if Germany had had a foreign trade to keep up, her financial position would be less favorable for the continued prosecution of the war. In any case it is doubtful whether, if the idea of cargo-carrying submarines is practicable, a commercial blockade can ever be enforced in any future war.

Sir Edward Grey has agreed that after the war the ideal of the freedom of the seas may very properly become a subject for definition and discussion. ‘After the war,’ he said, because a reversal of British policy during its progress is out of the question. Great Britain has made a sincere effort — at some risk, as she thought, to her own interests — to carry on the war in accordance with law and with due regard to the rights of neutrals. If she has been driven from her early position, it is through the necessity of establishing approximately equal conditions in the war at sea between herself and Germany, and of defending rights which were not merely belligerent but in neutral interest too. A reversal of her policy during the war would be regarded by British people as a concession to a series of crimes which demand punishment. But though the punitive measures that have been taken cannot be arrested during the war, or at any rate until the just rights that have been outraged have been vindicated, it may well be that the war will clarify the ideas officially held about this ideal of the freedom of the sea and pave the way for a complete identity of views between the American and British governments on this question.

Mr. Balfour in his recent statement seemed to take a different view; but, as his argument showed, he is most anxious for a complete understanding between Great Britain and the United States, and this ideal of freedom on the seas supplies too broad and substantial a basis of agreement for it to be neglected.

The submarine, though it has been guilty of the worst outrages on the ideal, may for that very reason be the means of assisting its acceptance if its crimes lead to a complete understanding between the British and American governments. There is no reason why this understanding, if the materials for it already exist, should be postponed to the end of the war. Rather let it be reached now and used to strengthen the common defense. The ideal of the freedom of the seas is too fine to be left to the risk of perversion by the power which has shown repeatedly that it is prepared to violate the rights of neutrals. The United States and Great Britain are the two powers marked out by their character and history to join in securing the ideal for the advantage of the world. These two powers, great as their differences may have been and perhaps still are, have this bond in common, that they have both a reverence for the idea of law, alike in domestic and in international politics, such as possesses no other nations. Their history, with the tragic story of the last war between them and their hopes of a firm friendship in the future, points in the same direction. What better centenary celebration of the Peace of Ghent could there be than the knowledge that these two powers had at length reached a complete agreement on all the questions of policy at sea which had divided them in the past?

The external form that this agreement should take and the means that should be employed for giving it effect raise so many difficult questions of internal American politics that it is not seemly for a foreigner — even a British foreigner — to express very decided views. It is a principle of American foreign policy to abstain from entangling European alliances — a principle which is the obverse of the Monroe Doctrine itself. America, too, both on moral grounds and also because she has always a larger proportion of her population still in process of assimilation to her national character than any other nation, is profoundly attached to peace, and this horrible war can have done nothing to weaken that attachment. But the United States have never had any objection to association with European powers for a specific and limited end; nor would such an association with the Allies for the defense of the freedom of the seas necessarily, or even probably, result in war.

The association — the word alliance is deliberately rejected for the vaguer term — might take shape in two measures. The first would be an announcement that the United States and Great Britain and her allies had come to an agreement for joint action for the protection of neutral lives and shipping against the German submarine operations. That would be America’s consideration to the Allies. Secondly, Great Britain and America, with or without France and Russia, might meet and draft a code of law, to come into force at the end of the war, which should give formal expression to the agreed principles of the freedom of the seas. That would be the Allies’ consideration to America.

These principles are in need of closer definition, but they would include the abolition of the right of capture, the abolition of commercial blockade, and the prohibition of the use of mines outside territorial waters, or even in the enemy’s territorial waters without notice to neutrals. The second reform would probably need as its corollary a new and more stringent list of contraband, and the third an extension of the limit of territorial waters, which was fixed at three miles because that was the extreme range of guns, but which ought now, on the same principle, to be twelve miles or more. This new code would not take effect until after the end of the war; and although the changes may be somewhat in advance of public opinion now, it is fairly certain that they will not be then.