During the Civil War we sent food to the starving mill operatives of England who were exposed to famine by the war, although English-built and equipped privateers were destroying our commerce, and England was actively supporting our enemies in other ways. Germany sent us food, chemicals, goods, shoes and necessary supplies in one of the most needful stages of the war, for non-contraband supplies were recognized as immune from seizure or destruction. A blockade is illegal unless it is effective in blockading the point named. The blockading of a whole nation and the rejection of the immunity character of non-contraband supplies intended for the civil population, down to the furnishings of the Red Cross, is an English expedient and a product of the late war, though the same policy was tentatively tried in England’s war against the Boer republics. We held that such blockade was illegal, for in the note of October 21, 1915, our State Department said: “There is no better settled principle of law of nations than that which forbids the blockade of neutral points in time of war,” and we reminded the British government that Sir Edward Grey said to the British delegates to the “Conference assembled at London upon the invitation of the British government,” that: A blockade must be confined to the ports and coasts of the enemy, but it may be instituted at one port or at several ports or at the whole of the seaboard of the enemy. It may be instituted to prevent the ingress only or egress only, or both. And because England had violated these and numerous other principles, agreements, covenants and pledges we said to her: “It has been conclusively shown that the methods sought to be employed by Great Britain to obtain and use evidence of enemy destination of cargoes bound for neutral ports and impose a contraband character upon such cargoes are without justification; that the =blockade upon which such methods are partly founded is ineffective, illegal and indefensible=.... The United States, therefore, cannot submit to the curtailment of its neutral rights by these measures, which are admittedly retaliatory, and therefore =illegal in conception and in nature, and intended to punish the enemies of Great Britain for alleged illegalities on their part=.” But the State Department surrendered to the contentions of England. We submitted to countless outrages (see extract from Senator Chamberlain’s speech under “England Threatens United States”); we made it unpleasant for native Americans who determined to send non-contraband goods across the seas; approved England’s assumption of dictatorial control of the commerce of Holland and Scandinavia and held that Germany was equally our enemy as England’s on the ground that in using her submarines to sink merchant vessels feeding England she had violated our rights to the free use of the seas.