its merchants’ commerce with the Allies, because the British Fleet in its right of war is controlling their commerce with Germany. The German Admiralty has substituted piracy for war on the sea; and now, powerless to enforce its war right, it struggles to achieve the same results by the devious process of an American embargo. To enforce their rights of war nations sacrifice the lives of men; Germany to make good her lost rights is willing to sacrifice a friendly State. In furtherance of this, unconsciously I feel sure, Mr. Norman Angell has lent his facile pen, and he threatens us with war with the United States unless we forgo the benefits which the command of the sea has given us. If it were possible to imagine President Wilson to acquiesce by so much as the movement of his little finger, granting to Germany any fraction of the indirect help she so urgently needs, then indeed clouds would gather on the horizon--there is no half-way house between neutrality and alliance with the enemy.[30] But we may rest assured there is no such possibility. Before, therefore, Mr. Norman Angell further develops his theory I would commend to his study those mighty disputations concerning the ‘freedom of the sea’ which were held twenty years ago between the United States and Great Britain, _quorum pars parvula fui_. _We_ knew what we were quarrelling about. But Germany! She tells the unlistening world that she is fighting for ‘the traditional _mare liberum_’! What can this _parvenu_ of the high seas know of its traditions? And for the delectation of pacifist ears this programme has been arranged: ‘a free sea,’ which shall mean ‘the cessation of the danger of war and the stopping of world-wars,’ and ‘the sending of troops and war machines into the territory of others or into neutralized ports’ is to be ‘declared a _casus belli_.’[31] From which it appears that the proposed remedy will hardly cure the disease. ‘It is with no mere idle use of high-sounding phrase that Great Britain once more appears to vindicate the freedom of the sea.’ Thus we spoke in the argument in the Behring Sea Arbitration. And we may continue so to speak with clearest conscience; for a careful scrutiny will show that the principle of the Order in Council is new, if you will, but in legitimate sequence from well-established doctrines, and has sprung from them in an ordered and scientific development. Of the American Protest which criticises it, speaking with all due respect for the learned authors of it, it is, I venture to think, open on its destructive side to this general remark: that it enunciates old doctrines in their popular form without that full examination of the underlying principles which the grave state of the world’s affairs demands. On its constructive side, however, it is interesting and worthy of careful study. _General View of the Main Provision of the Order in Council_