a progressive science; it has not yet pronounced its last word on the relations between belligerency and neutrality. A neutral Government is not entitled to assume that it alone is the judge of what that last word will be. These fundamental principles have been lost sight of in the Protests of the United States to Great Britain. Yet there never was a case in which calm discussion was more necessary, for we have come to a point when the question is definitely raised whether international law is to stand still where the last war left it, or whether its principles are sufficiently elastic to allow of their adaptation to modern developments of the machinery of war. I say deliberately that this calm discussion must result in the completest justification of the Order in Council; if it does not, the doom of international law is certain. But the discussion which has arisen round the Order in Council has one peculiar feature. It is, I suppose, one of the blessings resulting from freedom of speech that our own people should criticise the action of their Government, even when the country is engaged in a conflict which must be fought out to the bitter end. To so much of the world as lies beyond the shadow of the clouds of war, that little fragment of it which is still capable of calm thinking, this curious spectacle has been presented, that to the passionate assertions of the Central Powers, to the dispassionate threats of the United States, there has been added the angry criticism of our own people, in which the press and correspondents, of high and low degree of learning, have joined without remorse. I have looked in vain for one defender of the faith. Assuredly American dialectic needed no such heartening; the insistence that the American view of international law is alone worthy to be received needed no such support as it has had from our own people. It is true that some of them have been inspired by the British desire that, whate’er betide, England must fight fair. But the end which the angry criticism had in view, and professes to have achieved, was not this at all; it was that the Government should take other steps to accomplish what had already been accomplished by the Order in Council, should decline on a range of lower action, and a narrower line of legal thought. The new Protest, in paragraph 19, does not fail to make the point. Whatever it may be worth, the distinguished chemists, foremost among the critics, are responsible for furnishing the United States with the argument.