er and ravaging. No form of war
indeed causes so little human suffering as the capture of property at sea.
It is more akin to process of law, such as distress for rent, or execution
of judgment, or arrest of a ship, than to a military operation. Once, it is
true, it was not so. In the days of privateers it was accompanied too
often, and particularly in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, with
lamentable cruelty and lawlessness, and the existence of such abuses was
the real reason for the general agreement to the Declaration of Paris by
which privateering was abolished.

But it was not the only reason. The idea of privateering was a survival of
a primitive and unscientific conception of war, which was governed mainly
by a general notion of doing your enemy as much damage as possible and
making reprisal for wrongs he had done you. To the same class of ideas
belonged the practice of plunder and ravaging ashore. But neither of these
methods of war was abolished for humanitarian reasons. They disappeared
indeed as a general practice before the world had begun to talk of
humanity. They were abolished because war became more scientific. The right
to plunder and ravage was not denied. But plunder was found to demoralise
your troops and unfit them for fighting, and ravaging proved to be a less
powerful means of coercing your enemy than exploiting the occupied country
by means of regular requisitions for the supply of your own army and the
increase of its offensive range. In short, the reform arose from a desire
to husband your enemy's resources for your own use instead of wantonly
wasting them.

In a similar way privateering always had a debilitating effect upon our own
regular force. It greatly increased the difficulty of manning the navy, and
the occasional large profits had a demoralising influence on detached
cruiser commanders. It tended to keep alive the mediaeval corsair spirit at
the expense of the modern military spirit which made for direct operations
against the enemy's armed forces. It was inevitable that as the new
movement of opinion gathered force it should carry with it a conviction
that for operating against sea-borne trade sporadic attack could never be
so efficient as an organised system of operations to secure a real
strategical control of the enemy's maritime communications. A riper and
sounder view of war revealed that what may be called tactical commercial
blockade--that is, the blockade of ports--could