By permitting this, we showed that our policy, in other words, was not to attack but to wait attack, and then not to do anything to compel the enemy to attack. Our sea statesmen had not indoctrinated the civil government with a clearly defined policy that it was prepared to enforce at the opening of hostilities. Yet in a matter of this kind it was exactly at the opening of hostilities that a stringent blockade, accompanied by a generous rationing of sea supplies to the neutrals bordering on Germany, could have been proclaimed and enforced with the least friction. For, in the first place, Germany’s declaration of war was so entirely unprovoked and sudden, and her first measure of war, the invasion of Belgium--when her soldiery became at once outrageous--combined the world over to create a neutral opinion strongly in favour of the Allies. Next, the fact that Great Britain’s participation in the war was both professedly and actually in loyalty to the identical obligation to Belgium which Germany had violated, predisposed America, for the first time since the colonies proclaimed their independence, to an active sympathy with the British ideal, perhaps because for the first time that ideal appeared to them to be one that was purely chivalrous. It was then everything that the psychological moment should have been seized. Nor could it have been difficult to see that, if the opportunity was allowed to slip by, the mere fact that a half measure--to wit, the suspense of German shipping--had been enforced, must lead to a new condition, namely, a hugely magnified trade through the neutral ports. This trade, it is true, was nominally confined to goods that were not contraband of war. But contraband is an elastic term, and, to make things worse, the British Government proclaimed its intention--so little had war-trained thought prepared its policy--of accepting the provisions of the unexecuted Declaration of London as defining what contraband was to be. This gave the enemy the liberty to import materials indispensable to his manufacture of munitions and of armament, was one of which full advantage was taken. It was bad enough that cotton, indispensable ores, the raw materials of glycerine as well as the finished product, were poured into the laboratories, the factories, and the arsenals of Germany without stint or limit. It was, if possible, worse that this traffic created gigantic exporting interests in America which, once vested, made the restriction of them wear the appearance of an intolerable hardship when, many months too late, more stringent measures were taken. So powerful indeed had these interests become, that the real and rigid blockade which, under the doctrines of the “continuous voyage” and the “ultimate destination” would from the first have been fully consonant with international law, was actually never attempted at all until the United States themselves became belligerents.