ffic. The complaints of merchants, so far as they are known,
relate mainly to this kind of work in the West Indies and home waters,
while accounts of serious captures by large privateers on the high seas are
comparatively rare. The actual damage done by the swarm of small vessels
may not have been great, but its moral effects were very serious. It was
impossible for the strongest Governments to ignore them, and the
consequence was a chronic disturbance of the larger strategical
dispositions. While these dispositions were adequate to check the
operations of large privateers acting in the same way as regular cruisers,
the smaller ones found very free play amidst the ribwork of the protective
system, and they could only be dealt with by filling up the spaces with a
swarm of small cruisers to the serious detriment of the larger
arrangements. Even so, the proximity of the enemy's ports made escape so
easy, that the work of repression was very ineffective. The state of the
case was indeed almost identical with a people's war. The ordinary devices
of strategy failed to deal with it, as completely as Napoleon's broadly
planned methods failed to deal with the _guerilleros_ in Spain, or as our
own failed for so long in South Africa.

By the abolition of privateering, then, it would seem that the most
disturbing part of the problem has been eliminated. It is, of course,
uncertain how far the Declaration of Paris will hold good in practice. It
is still open even to the parties to it to evade its restrictions to a
greater or less extent by taking up and commissioning merchantmen as
regular ships of war. But it is unlikely that such methods will extend
beyond the larger privately owned vessels. Any attempt to revive in this
way the old _picaresque_ methods could only amount to a virtual repudiation
of statutory international law, which would bring its own retribution.
Moreover, for home waters at least, the conditions which favoured this
_picaresque_ warfare no longer exist. In the old wars the bulk of our trade
came into the Thames, and thence the greater part of it was distributed in
small coasting vessels. It was against this coastwise traffic that the
small, short-range privateers found their opportunity and their richest
harvest. But, now that so many other great centres of distribution have
established themselves, and that the bulk of the distribution is done by
internal lines of communication, the Channel is no longer the sole a