this proceeding, not on the general principles of warfare,
but on the ground of reprisal. Germany declared her submarine warfare on
merchant ships on February 4, 1915; Great Britain replied with her
announcement of March 1st, in which she declared her intention of
preventing "commodities of any kind from reaching or leaving Germany."
The British advanced this procedure as a retaliation for the illegal
warfare which Germany had declared on merchant shipping, both that of
the enemy and of neutrals. "The British and French governments will
therefore hold themselves free to detain and take into port ships
carrying goods of presumed enemy destination, ownership, and origin."
This sentence accurately describes the purposes of a blockade--to cut
the enemy off from all commercial relations with the outside world; yet
the procedure Great Britain now proposed to follow was not that of a
blockade. When this interdict is classically laid, any ship that
attempts to run the lines is penalized with confiscation, along with its
cargo; but such a penalty was not to be exacted in the present instance.
Great Britain now proposed to purchase cargoes of conditional contraband
discovered on seized ships and return the ships themselves to their
owners, and this soon became the established practice. Not only did the
Foreign Office purchase all cotton which was seized on its way to
Germany, but it took measures to maintain the price in the markets of
the world. In the succeeding months Southern statesmen in both Houses of
Congress railed against the British seizure of their great staple, yet
the fact was that cotton was all this time steadily advancing in price.
When Senator Hoke Smith made a long speech advocating an embargo on the
shipment of munitions as a punishment to Great Britain for stopping
American cotton on the way to Germany, the acute John Sharp Williams, of
Mississippi, arose in the Senate and completely annihilated the Georgia
politician by demonstrating how the Southern planters were growing rich
out of the war.

That the so-called "blockade" situation was a tortuous one must be
apparent from this attempt to set forth the salient facts. The basic
point was that there could be no blockade of Germany unless the neutral
ports of contiguous countries were also blockaded, and Great Britain
believed that she had found a precedent for doing this in the operations
of the American Navy in the Civil War. But it is obvious that the
situati