ars held the people of the United States in high esteem: they had not,
as a rule, so favourably regarded the Government at Washington,
especially in its conduct of foreign relations. They had long regarded
our Government as ignorant of European affairs and amateurish in its
cockiness. When I first got to London I found evidence of this feeling,
even in the most friendly atmosphere that surrounded us. Mr. Bryan was
looked on as a joke. They forgot him--rather, they never took serious
notice of him. But, when the Panama tolls incident was closed, they
regarded the President as his own Foreign Secretary; and thus our
Government as well as our Nation came into this high measure of esteem.

"The war began. We, of course, took a neutral attitude, wholly to their
satisfaction. But we at once interfered--or tried to interfere--by
insisting on the Declaration of London, which no Great Power but the
United States (I think) had ratified and which the British House of
Lords had distinctly rejected. That Declaration would probably have
given a victory to Germany if the Allies had adopted it. In spite of
our neutrality we insisted vigorously on its adoption and aroused a
distrust in our judgment. Thus we started in wrong, so far as the
British Government is concerned."

The rules of maritime warfare which the American State Department so
disastrously insisted upon were the direct outcome of the Hague
Conference of 1907. That assembly of the nations recognized, what had
long been a palpable fact, that the utmost confusion existed in the
operations of warring powers upon the high seas. About the fundamental
principle that a belligerent had the right, if it had the power, to keep
certain materials of commerce from reaching its enemy, there was no
dispute. But as to the particular articles which it could legally
exclude there were as many different ideas as there were nations. That
the blockade, a term which means the complete exclusion of cargoes and
ships from an enemy's ports, was a legitimate means of warfare, was also
an accepted fact, but as to the precise means in which the blockade
could be enforced there was the widest difference of opinion. The Hague
Conference provided that an attempt should be made to codify these laws
into a fixed system, and the representatives of the nations met in
London in 1908, under the presidency of the Earl of Desart, for this
purpose. The outcome of their two months' deliberations was that
document