If, then, from the preceding retrospect it appears that whatever advance we have made on the maritime usages of our ancestors has been due solely to international agreement, and to a friendly concert between the chief Powers of the world, acting with a view to their permanent and collective interests, the inference is evidently in favour of any further advance being only possible in the same way. The renunciations of each Power redound to the benefit of each and all; nor can the gain of the world involve any real loss for the several nations that compose it. We shall therefore, perhaps, not err far from the truth, if we imagine the following articles, in complement of those formulated in Paris in 1856, to constitute the International Marine Code which will be found in the future to be most calculated to remove sources of contention between nations, and best adapted, therefore, to the permanent interests of the contracting parties: 1. Privateering is and remains abolished. 2. The merchant vessels and cargoes of belligerents shall be exempted from seizure and confiscation. 3. The colonies of either belligerent shall be excluded from the field of legitimate hostilities, and the neutrality of their territory shall extend to their ships and commerce. 4. The right of visiting and searching neutral or hostile merchantmen for contraband of war shall be abolished. 5. Contraband of war shall be defined by international agreement; and to deal in such contraband shall be made a breach of the civil law, prohibited and punished by each State as a violation of its proclamation of neutrality. 6. Except in the case of contraband as aforesaid, all trade shall be lawful between the subjects of either belligerent, since individuals are no more involved in the quarrel between their respective governments at sea than they are on land. 7. The only limitation to commerce shall be so effective a blockade of an enemy’s ports as shall render it impossible for ships to enter or leave them; and the mere notification that a port is blockaded shall not justify the seizure of ships that have sailed from, or are sailing to, them in any part of the world. 8. The right to lay hostile embargoes on the ships of a friendly Power, by reason of a dispute arising between them, shall be abolished. 9. The right to confiscate or destroy the ships of a friendly Power for the service of a belligerent State, the _jus angariæ_, shall be abolished.