To establish an international court _ad hoc_, in the middle of the war, and ask it to settle the new questions as they arise? To submit all cases to the neutral powers, with all the small European neutrals terrified of offending their big military neighbours? Refer all questions to the United States alone? Call another conference to revise the Declaration of London, and keep all prizes waiting till it reported? I doubt if any of these courses would please many people. There may be some course which would have been better than the normal one, but it certainly is not obvious to the ordinary eye. And it seems a little hard to denounce the British Government as lawless tyrants, justly hated by the world, because they do not pursue a better method of settling prize cases than any one has yet practised, or perhaps even devised. V. So much for general principles; let us now consider whether in detailed practice the claims of the British Government or the practice of the British courts have been particularly reprehensible. The two questions are of course distinct; and my own impression, given merely for what it may be worth, is that the decisions of the courts will bear the severest scrutiny, while the claims of the Government are closely analogous to the claims advanced by all governments in a similar situation. They will compare not unfavourably, for instance, with the claims of the United States in the Civil War. It should also be noticed that Great Britain does not act alone; and as compared with the precedents laid down by various nations in previous wars, a policy agreed upon by six of the most important maritime powers in the world has at least a slightly higher claim to validity than one laid down by a single power. Mr. Bullard in one extremely high-principled passage explains that the United States could not in conscience join the Allies in this war because that would be fighting in order "to make British convenience the rule of the seas." But here his moral feelings have evidently intoxicated him. It is obvious that, if the United States had cared to come in,--which I am not for a moment urging,--the law of the seas would, at the very worst, have been interpreted, not for the convenience of Great Britain alone but for the convenience of Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Japan and the United States.