What, then, would remain for the naval forces of maritime Powers to do? Everything, it may be replied, which constitutes legitimate warfare, and conforms to the elementary conception of a state of hostility; the blockading of hostile ports, and all the play of attack and defence that may be imagined between belligerent navies. Whatsoever is more than this--the plunder of an enemy’s commerce, embargoes on his ships, the search of neutral vessels--not only cometh of piracy, as has been shown, but is in fact piracy itself, without any necessary connection with the conduct of legitimate hostilities. CHAPTER IV. MILITARY REPRISALS. _Si quis clamet iniquum non dare pœnas qui peccavit, respondeo multo esse iniquius tot innocentium millia citra meritum in extremam vocari calamitatem._--ERASMUS. International law on legitimate reprisals--The Brussels Conference on the subject--Illustrations of barbarous reprisals--Instances of non-retaliation--Savage reprisals in days of chivalry--Hanging the commonest reprisals for a brave defence, as illustrated by the warfare of the fifteenth century--Survival of the custom to our own times--The massacre of a conquered garrison still a law of war--The shelling of Strasburg by the Germans--Brutal warfare of Alexander the Great--The connection between bravery and cruelty--The abolition of slavery in its effects on war--The storming of Magdeburg, Brescia, and Rome--Cicero on Roman warfare--The reprisals of the Germans in France in 1870--Their revival of the custom of taking hostages--Their resort to robbery as a plea of reprisals--General Von Moltke on perpetual peace--The moral responsibility of the military profession--The Press as a potent cause of war--Plea for the abolition of demands for unconditional surrender, such as led to the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. On no subject connected with the operations of war has International Law come as yet to lamer conclusions than concerning Military Reprisals, or the revenge that may be fairly exacted by one belligerent from the other for violation of the canons of honourable warfare.