The paraphrase of this new formula is more easy. First: wars shall cease upon the high seas; and as ‘men-of-war’ obviously include transports, wars will thenceforward be confined to continents; bellicose islands will never again be allowed to participate. Permanent peace will thus be established in part of the world; and for the rest, seeing that you cannot expect to achieve everything at once, there must be just one more war, in which Germany will reduce Russia to impotence, absorb the small States, and crush France and Italy without the interference of troublesome over-sea soldiers; after which the beatific vision of a permanent Teutonic peace. Secondly: with regard to so much of the formula as relates to neutrals, the justice of it must become apparent if you introduce as a prelude the tearful appeal so often heard of late from Berlin--‘You pray for peace, and yet you arm our enemies to fight.’ It is unkind to substitute for this--‘You will not let us crush our enemies in our own way’; yet it is its exact equivalent; and reduced to a practical proposition it means this, that when nations go to war they must fight with their own resources, which not even the dreamiest of the Pacifists would assent to, for then those little nations, in whose prosperity Mr. Norman Angell so much believes,[28] would go to the wall. It would give the strong States the power to crush them, picking their quarrel when and how they will. But if you will not agree to this so-simple proposition, then, for goodness’ as well as for profit’s sake, be logical and trade with both belligerents alike; do not let yourselves ‘be influenced in the direction of conscious wilful restriction’ by so trivial a matter as the ‘command of the sea.’ Sea-power on which it rests must be abolished altogether, which would be a great step towards permanent peace. With the bearing of the ‘command of the sea’ upon the third phrase of its ‘neutralization’ this article specially concerns itself. All this and more lies between the extremes of Mr. Norman Angell’s threat; either this, or the United States will take the command of the sea into its own hands. One may reasonably doubt whether this view commends itself to President Wilson; whether it has even entered the minds of the ‘influential backers’ of the demand for an enormously increased American fleet. Yet, if I may say it with profound respect, it is only another manifestation of the fundamental misunderstanding of the law of war which characterises the Protest itself.