ltic against the traffic from the Scandinavian neutral
states effective. That's a good technical objection; but, since
practically all the traffic between those States and Germany is in
our products, much of the real force of it is lost.

If a protest is made against cotton being made contraband--it'll
amount to nothing and give only irritation. It will only play into
Hoke Smith[14]--German hands and accomplish nothing here. We make
as much fuss about points which we have silently to yield later as
about a real principle. Hence they all say that the State
Department is merely captious, and they pay less and less attention
to it and care less and less for American opinion--if only they can
continue to get munitions. We are reducing English regard to this
purely mercenary basis....

We are--under lawyers' quibbling--drifting apart very rapidly, to
our complete isolation from the sympathy of the whole world.

Yours forever sincerely,

W.H.P.

Page refers in this letter to the "blockade"; this was the term which
the British Government itself used to describe its restrictive measures
against German commerce, and it rapidly passed into common speech. Yet
the truth is that Great Britain never declared an actual blockade
against Germany. A realization of this fact will clear up much that is
obscure in the naval warfare of the next two years. At the beginning of
the Civil War, President Lincoln laid an interdict on all the ports of
the Confederacy; the ships of all nations were forbidden entering or
leaving them: any ship which attempted to evade this restriction, and
was captured doing so, was confiscated, with its cargo. That was a
blockade, as the term has always been understood. A blockade, it is well
to keep in mind, is a procedure which aims at completely closing the
blockaded country from all commercial intercourse with the world. A
blockading navy, if the blockade is successful, or "effective,"
converts the whole country into a beleaguered fortress, just as an army,
surrounding a single town, prevents goods and people from entering or
leaving it. Precisely as it is the purpose of a besieging army to starve
a particular city or territory into submission, so it is the aim of a
blockading fleet to enforce the same treatment on the nation as a whole.
It is also essential to keep in mind that the question of contraband has
nothing to do with