before the case went to the Supreme Court, and his government, though the British were the first victims of the new doctrine, sustained him. Apparently the mistress of the seas realized that the Americans had brought forth a principle which would prove to her navy a very present help in time of trouble. Italy acted on the principle in 1896 in her war with Abyssinia; Britain in 1900 during the Boer War; and in the Great War of 1914-1919 came the "annihilation" which Bluntschli had predicted. The neutral trade of Holland in contraband goods, and to a less extent that of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, with America and other neutral countries was cut off under the evil precedent set by the United States in 1861-1865; and after 1917 the American navy assisted in enforcing the bitter restrictions.

The British task in the Great War has been more difficult to administer and to justify than that of the United States earlier: for, whereas such a port as Nassau in the island of New Providence in the Bahamas was very small, had but a small population behind it, and was visited by only a few vessels a year, Holland, on the other hand, is a flourishing country, with a large sea-borne commerce of its own, a large land trade with Germany, and a large population to provide for. When the yearly trade statistics of the place of trans-shipment mounted suspiciously high, it was easy in the case of Nassau and difficult in the case of Holland and the other neutral countries in Northern Europe, to determine how much of the trade was legitimate, how much fraudulent. Trade with Germany in the latter case was cut off, and the necessity of shipments from neutral countries to take the place of the goods, which had ceased coming from Germany, seemed to justify a certain increase in the Dutch trade from

overseas.

But, though the task of the British. was more difficult than that of the

Americans, they performed it with more severity. They brought about the formation of the Netherland Overseas Trust, an organization of Dutch business men, to whom alone shipments for Holland must be consigned, if they went at all; shipments to individuals, and goods sent under the mystifying phrase "to order", were not allowed to pass. British diplomatic officials announced from time to time in various neutral countries what articles could, and what articles could not, be shipped to Holland. To get certain goods from over the sea the Dutch were forced to agree that they would not allow those goods to go into Germany. That belligerent country, on the other hand, which usually furnished Holland with much of the coal and iron requisite for her industries, would not let these go over the line unless the Dutch practically paid for them in the articles which the Allies did not wish to furnish them. Thus was the Low Country crushed between the upper and the nether mill stone, between the Devil Huns and the deep sea British. Not even the products of her own East Indian colonies were allowed to reach Holland.

In compassing this downfall of the neutrals, whom Nature had located too conveniently near to belligerent Germany, Britain changed some of the rules of the right of search, and the American Secretary of State raised no objections. For fear of mines, sub-marines, and airplanes, her vessels of war would refuse to conduct the search of their victims on the high seas, but would bring the captive vessel for search into some quiet and secure harbor, where, with their X-ray machines to detect the copper, rubber, and other articles concealed in cotton bales, they could carry on the search with a thoroughness that was not possible on the sea. Necessarily delays. were long.

More serious still than the working of the law of contraband is the restriction,

of the rights of neutrals on the sea in time of war by the law of blockade. Here the one substantial gain made by neutrals, the abolition of the paper blockade, has been more than offset by several gains for belligerents. In the beginning, when navies were weak, all blockades were paper blockades, mere declarations that a certain belligerent port was sealed against ingress and egress, unsupported by vessels of war stationed at the designated ports. In this way Britain essayed to close the French and Spanish ports in the Seven Years War after 1756, the French and Spanish ports in the American Revolution, and those of many countries in the wars of the French Revolutions and in the Napoleonic wars. The Berlin decree of November 21, 1806, the preamble of which said: "The British Islands are declared in a state of blockade," was issued by Napoleon when France had not a single ship on the ocean. The First and Second Armed Neutralities rose against the ridiculous abuse, and set as their standard "That to determine what constitutes a blockaded port, this designation shall apply only to a port where the attacking power has stationed its vessels sufficiently near and in such a way as to render access thereto clearly dangerous." This was totally without effect, as was shown by the succeeding "mockery" of the paper blockades of the British Orders in Council against France, and of the Berlin and Milan decrees of France against Great Britain. The fourth rule of the Declaration of Paris in 1856 wrote into the code of international law the following which is now universally recognized as binding: "Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective, that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy."

Aside from this notable advance blockades have since 1856 become harder and harder for neutrals to bear. The old fashioned siege by sea of a single

port, the original idea of a blockade, has been developed, notably in 1861-1865 and in 1914-1919, into what has been called a commercial blockade, carried on without regard to military operations, a trade war in reality against a whole coast. The idea was prevalent in the world before 1861, and President Buchanan had laid down the abolition of the new system as a condition, in addition to the abolition of the capture of all private property on the sea in time of war, which the nations of the world must meet before he would add the signature of the United States to the Declaration of Paris, but his effort failed. The Civil War came on without any international agreement binding this or any other nation in regard to the matter and in the succeeding blockade of the Confederate ports by the United States, a commercial blockade instituted by the nation that till then had opposed such an extension of the law of blockade, freedom of the seas for neutrals received another hard blow.

Richard H. Dana, in his valuable edition of Wheaton's International Law, wrote in 1866: "Efforts have been made during this century to prohibit what are called purely commercial blockades. These are understood to be blockades of commercial towns, not being naval stations or military posts, instituted for the purpose of merely closing them against commerce, and not as a part of warlike operations directed to the capture of the place or its actual investment or siege. Blockades of the latter description may be called for convenience, and in the absence of any settled term, military or strategic blockades. The efforts in this direction came chiefly from the United States, until the Civil War of 1861-1865, when they established the largest commercial blockade ever known, and carried it out with extraordinary success. It extended from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, both on the Atlantic Coast and on the Gulf of Mexico, over a stretch of upwards of 3,000

miles. Except at Charleston the blockading force made no attempts to reduce the cities blockaded. Not more than one of the ports and that for only a short time, was a naval station of the enemy; and none of them were military or fortified towns, unless every town is such, which is defended at all; and none of the ports, except Charleston, and for at short time, one or two others, were subjects of direct military operations looking to their siege or reduction. This vast blockade for four years, was purely commercial. The great aid it contributed toward the diminution of the resources of the enemy, their exhaustion and final surrender, and the now generally recognized necessity for it, have doubtless been instructive to America and the rest of the world. It has shown that there may be wars in which such a blockade may be extremely useful, if not necessary."

The application of the doctrine of continuous voyage to blockades bore even more heavily upon neutral shipping. As the law stood down to 1861, a neutral vessel could be stopped by the belligerents at any time on her way to a blockaded enemy port. From 1861 to 1865, in its efforts to put down the Confederacy, the United States used its navy to capture neutral vessels bound to neutral ports, when these were common ports of trans-shipment to enemy ports, just as it had captured and confiscated contraband cargoes destined to an enemy country through neutral ports. Sometimes capture and condemnation of the transgressing vessel entailed the loss of the cargo, but not necessarily so if this was not contraband. Often the cargoes were

returned to the owners by the prize

courts and the vessel confiscated as an intended blockade runner.

In cases in which the cargo was contraband and the vessel was intending itself to make the run through the blockade from Nassau, Havana, and the other nearby ports, both vessel and cargo were lost in the

prize court. If the captured vessel intended to make the neutral port only and there to deliver the contraband cargo to another vessel for running the blockade, the first vessel itself might be freed from the charge of blockade running and the cargo condemned as contraband. Thus the taint of contraband carrying and of blockade running were closely interwoven.

In accordance with this American

precedent of 1861-1865 the British navy in the war of 1914-1919 captured many a neutral vessel bound to a neutral port when that port was a convenient stopping place on the way to Germany. The capturing cruisers did not content themselves with hovering about close to the blockaded ports in the old-fashioned stationary cordon, but ranged over the sea for hundreds of miles taking their victims in what was called a long-distanced blockade. The application of the doctrine of continuous voyage to blockade is as vast an extension of the rights of belligerents as it is in the case of contraband. To all intents and purposes Holland was as much blockaded during the present war as was Germany.

The entrance to German ports has been blocked by automatic floating and anchored contact mines, and by war zones, both of which may be looked upon as the logical development of stone. blockades. The latter were known early in the nineteenth century, but when the United States carried out the idea in the Civil War by sinking ships loaded with stone in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, the British and the French raised loud complaint that a blockade. ought to be enforced by moving ships and not by stationary obstructions. It is stationary obstructions, however, on the high seas, that the Allies of the present day have availed themselves of in the mines which they have planted in harbors and in the mine fields of war

zones.

about. "Oh, it was the old quarrel between the two Earls in the time of Queen Elizabeth."

POLITICAL Both at home and INCON- abroad there are curSISTENCIES ious things appearing in print. Senator Lodge objects to the League of Nations, not avowedly because it is a Democratic concoction, but because it appears a dangerous scheme. His especial abhorrence is Article X which binds us to preserve the territorial integrity of the members of the League. This, declares the sapient senator, will cause us to be mixed up in the politics of Europe. At the same time he writes a letter to certain Italian-Americans-possible Republican voters-telling them that Italy has a perfect right to Fiume and adding that Jugo-Slavia may take the other ports of the Eastern Adriatic. Incidentally there are no other ports, as Italy has already been allocated Trieste and Pola. This advice about other peoples' property sounds strangely from the lips of one who would keep America free from entangling alliances.

So does the learned senator's recent resolution favoring the independence of Armenia, including Russian and Persian Armenia, and the northern part of the Province of Azerbaijan. We wonder how many Massachusetts voters are lying awake nights worrying over Azerbaijan.

A bit of British wisdom equally absurd may be cited in this connection. The Editor of Blackwood's-that staid, old fashioned Tory periodical,-anchored in the stream of time-thanks America for its "moral support" in the war. How much this sounds like the Kaiser, when the All Highest referred to the "contemptible little army" of the British, the one hundred thousand who fought the glorious rear guard action from Mons. In like manner the Blackwood's writer is quite blind to the meaning of the

million and a half American soldiers, simply because he hates anything savoring of democracy.

ANOTHER But this Blackwood's INCON- writer is inconsistent as SISTENCY well as ignorant of the contents of his own magazine, for in the same journal occurs most generous appreciation of our soldiers. This we cannot forbear to quote. Says Quex in his account of "The Return Push": "Our meetings with the Americans had so far been pretty casual. . . . but one day in July I accompanied our colonel and the colonel of our companion brigade on a motor trip to the coast, and we passed some thousands of them hard at work getting fit, and training with almost fervid enthusiasm. It used to be a joke of mine that on one occasion my horse shied because an Australian private saluted

No one could make a friendly jest of like kind against the American soldiers. When first they arrived in France no troops were more punctilious in practising the outward and visible evidences of discipline. Fit, with the perfect fitness of the man from 23 to 28, not a weed amongst them; intelligent-looking, splendidly eager to learn, they were much akin in physique and general qualities to our own immortal 'First Hundred Thousand.' I came across colonels and majors of the New York and Illinois Divisions getting experience in the line with our brigadiers and colonels. I have seen U. S. Army N. C. O.'s out in the fields receiving instruction from picked N. C. O.'s of our army in the art of shouting orders. Their officers and men undertook this training with a certain shy solemnity that I myself thought very attractive. I am doing no lip-service to a 'wish is father to the thought' sentiment when I say that manly modesty in respect to military achievements characterized all the fighting American soldiers that I met."

THE NATION We have long been LAMBASTED suspicious of the honesty of The Nation,

and our suspicions are confirmed by a biting aticle in the National Civic Federation Review of April 25th. The writer is W. J. Ghent, who says that he has been in the radical movement all his life and that he has met with fanaticisms of a wide range and degree but never with one "which could compass so wide a chasm as that between the professions and the practices of your journal." . . .

"I read your periodical regularly and keep my copies on file. I do not find in it the information believed by me to be authentic which I readily find elsewhere. You say: 'We have also been utilizing absolutely every source of information concerning Russia that we can get.' I emphatically dispute this statement; and I shall show that your belief in its correctness involves an almost incredible degree of self-deception. True enough, I find in The Nation much that is pertinent and valuable-the text of the Soviet constitution, of various Soviet decrees, etc.—and I willingly pay tribute to the enterprise of your periodical in gathering and publishing these documents. But the publication of them does not compensate for the omission of other and equally important matter.

"The text of a constitution or a decree is not a description of the workings of a government. You, who are always censuring and ridiculing the delinquencies of our administrators, would greet with sardonic laughter the publication in Russia of the United States Constitution and pure-food law as evidences of the kind of government under which we live. If you know anything of what is going on in Mexico you would hardly regard the publication of the new constitution as a description of political conditions in that land. It is even conceivable that a convention of horse-thieves might draw up a

constitution containing many altruistic and high-sounding declarations. But the publication of such a constitution would give only a very misleading notion of that organization or its workings. What the world is entitled to know is not only what the horse-thieves have to say about themselves, but what the people feloniously divested of their horse-flesh have to say about the thieves.

"Otherwise my indictment stands. You had special articles by Albert Rhys Williams (November 16), Michael S. Farbman (November 30 and February 8), George V. Lomonosoff (March 1), "Christian" (December 21)-the lastnamed a woozy melange of mysticism and flapdoodle-and John Rickman (January 11). With the exception of Rickman's article, which is nebulous in the extreme, these are all, in greater or less degree, pro-Bolshevist contributions."

THE BOLSHEVIST BOGEY

We have read and reread Walter Lippman's article in the New Republic entitled "The Political Scene." It reviews the task of Paris and contrasts the peace possible immediately after the armistice and that possible at present. Like the rest of our Yiddish literary efforts it is Cimmerian darkness occasionally lightened by brilliant flashes. But its air of profundity is only apparent, for it ends with the shallow formula of Ebert: Give Germany bread or she will go Bolshevik. This is the fallacy of food as instanced on a small scale by the history of our conscientious objectors at Fort Riley. At first they were handled with gloves, given liberty, and fed up.

The result was that as they grew fat they grew sassy, until Uncle Sam grew tired of their antics, spanked them and put them to bed in Fort Leavenworth.