Plata has been from first to last illegal.’ In truth, pacific blockade is a contradiction in terms. In practice, it is enforced by the same methods as blockade between belligerents; and a recent Dutch writer has well pointed out that the sole reason why it has not yet met with the unanimous disapproval of European powers is that hitherto it has been levelled against only the weakest states. It had from time out of mind been reckoned a perfectly regular proceeding to declare a port or a territory under blockade, and to affix penalties to the violation of that declaration, although, in point of fact, not a single vessel should be present to enforce its observance. But gradually this tenet met with less toleration; and in 1780, when America and France were combined against England, the three great powers of the North, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, entered into a league known as the ‘Armed Neutrality,’ with the object of evading the severe but ancient method of dealing with neutral commerce which Great Britain adopted. One of the articles which this confederacy agreed upon was: ‘A port is blockaded only when evident danger attends the attempt to run into it’—a principle which boldly denied the right of any power to close by a mere edict a single hostile port. But Britain doggedly persisted in the exercise of a right which had undoubtedly the sanction of custom; and the maritime powers of Europe were to wrangle and recriminate through still darker years before agreement could be reached. On the 21st of November 1806, Napoleon promulgated the famous Berlin Decree, which announced that every port in Great Britain was blockaded; and by an Order in Council, issued a year afterwards, the British government declared France and all the states which owned her supremacy to be subject to the same embargo. However far short the English performance might fall of their announced intention, the egregious pretentiousness of the French decree will be apparent enough to any one who remembers Macaulay’s saying of the Emperor: ‘The narrowest strait was to his power what it was of old believed that a running stream was to the sorceries of a witch.’ Yet, both governments were only carrying to its logical issue the old doctrine which neither had renounced—that a valid blockade might be constituted by mere notification. It was only in 1856 that, with the express purpose of removing as far as possible the uncertainty which hung over the rules of naval war, the great powers concurred in the Declaration of Paris, which has been called ‘a sort of doctrinal annex’ to the treaty of that year. Important as has been the operation of all the rules contained in that Declaration, the only one which concerns us here is the fourth: ‘Blockades in order to be binding must be effective—that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.’ This being practically an adoption of the