Moreover, since neither Spain, the United States, nor Mexico signed the Declaration of Paris, war with any of them would revive all the atrocities and disputes that have embittered previous wars in which England has been engaged. The precedent of former treaties, such as that between Sweden and the United Provinces in 1675, the United States and Prussia in 1785, and the United States and Italy in 1871, by which either party agreed in the event of war not to employ privateers against the other, affords an obvious sample of what diplomacy might yet do to diminish the chances of war between the signatory and the non-signatory Powers. The United States would have signed the Declaration of Paris if it had exempted the merchant vessels of belligerents as well from public armed vessels as from privateers: and this must be looked to as the next conquest of law over lawlessness. Russia and several other Powers were ready to accept the American amendment, which, having at first only fallen through owing to the opposition of England, was subsequently withdrawn by America herself. Nevertheless, that amendment remains the wish not only of the civilised world, but of our own merchants, whose carrying trade, the largest in the world, is, in the event of England becoming a belligerent, in danger of falling into the hands of neutral countries. In 1858 the merchants of Bremen drew up a formal protest against the right of ships of war to seize the property and ships of merchants.[87] In the war of 1866 Prussia, Italy, and Austria agreed to forego this time-honoured right of mutual plunder; and the Emperor of Germany endeavoured to establish the same limitation in the war of 1870. The old maxim of war, of which the custom is a survival, has long since been disproved by political economy--the doctrine, namely, that a loss to one country is a gain to another, or that one country profits by the exact extent of the injury that it effects against the property of its adversary. Having lost its basis in reason, it only remains to remove it from practice.