the culprit in the _Trent_ affair, and that too while we were still unsoothed from his last violation of our neutrality. The British Government, therefore, happened to be in a very irritable mood with the North, and though they had hitherto been inexhaustible in their sympathy with the Federal belligerent pretensions, they now peremptorily stopped their complacency and the North had to submit. Whether the claim made tentatively by the Northern Government is destined to become recognised by International Law is by no means clear. In the case in question the neutral was too powerful to be resisted. Shortly after, however, the same scheme was actually put in operation by one of the most famous of Mr. Taylor's colleagues, the "notorious Captain Roberts," the arch-blockade runner and a British naval officer. When the American war closed, the Turkish Government had been trying for months to suppress an insurrection in Crete by blockading the island on the old lines. Hobart (whose _nom de guerre_ as a blockade-runner was "Roberts"), profiting by his recent experience, undertook to suppress it in a week, and his offer was accepted. The insurgents were living entirely on supplies sent them from Greece, and Hobart having been placed in command of the blockading squadron proceeded at once to blockade the Greek vessels in their own ports, and the Cretans were immediately starved into surrender. This and every other indication show a tendency for the belligerent rights of blockade to increase at the expense of the neutral. If this be so, then blockade must become a more and more effective naval operation, and hence the importance of its study down to the minutest particulars from which any forecast of the future may be obtained.