If that could have been completely done, the war must of necessity have come to an early and merciful end. And there is no doubt that it might have been done during the first years of the struggle if practical common sense had been reinforced by executive ability commensurate with the demands of the occasion. As a matter of fact this was never completely accomplished until the war was in its last throes. To the very end the Confederate soldiers were clad in English-made cloth, shod with English-tanned leather, and largely fed upon Cincinnati bacon and corned beef which had been shipped to Nassau in the Bahamas and thence carried into Confederate ports by the daring of the English captains and the English crews of English-built and English-owned blockade running steamers. Very naturally the Federal Government understood and appreciated all these conditions, and very naturally it sought to take advantage of them by blockading Southern ports and thus preventing or at least embarrassing those importations upon which the South must mainly depend for its powder, its bullets, its clothing, its shoes, its arms and its provisions. Accordingly, one of the earliest acts of the Administration was the proclamation of a blockade of the Southern ports. This was issued as early as the nineteenth of April, 1861, two days after the Virginia Convention adopted an ordinance of secession and thus made war a certainty. There is this peculiarity about the international law of blockade, that the ships of no nation are under obligation to respect a blockade until it shall be made effective. That is to say, until the nation proclaiming the blockade can put a sufficient naval force at the mouth of each blockaded harbor to prevent the entry of ships, no foreign shipmasters are bound to respect the proclamation of blockade, and their blockade-running ships are not subject to seizure in the attempt to pass the paper barriers erected. At the first, of course, the blockade of Southern ports was technical rather than real. A foreign ship running in or out was not legally subject to seizure or destruction because the blockade was manifestly ineffective. But by impressing ferry-boats and every other craft that could carry guns into the naval service, the Federal Government was able presently to make its blockade so far effective that those ships which essayed to "run" it did so at risk of capture and with the certainty that capture must mean the confiscation of both ship and cargo. But so profitable was this commerce that the merchants and shipmasters engaged in it were ready to take all the risks involved, for the sake of its enormous pecuniary returns. It was a matter of easy reckoning that a single cargo carried either way and successfully delivered, would pay for the loss of the ship and cargo on the return voyage, and leave a rich margin of profit besides.