The demand for action, so strenuously expressed, during the Cotton-Contraband discussion, entirely ignored what the Government had already done. There may have been cause for criticism as to the effectiveness of executive action. I do not profess to know; but whether this were so or not, it was not to be remedied, as it was attempted to be remedied, by an attack on the validity of the Order in Council. It was said that many lawyers are agreed that it was invalid. I have ventured to present the other side for public consideration. A system of law, though intermittently created as occasion has arisen, must, if it is to be taken as serious law, stand the test of an evolutionary analysis. The doctrines of contraband and blockade cannot stand for a moment if they are based on no principle, if they go no further back than the commentators have carried them.[4] I have endeavoured to show that the principle on which both are based is the same, and is to be found in the Right of War: that both are the inevitable consequences affecting neutral merchants who have any relations with the enemy of the exercise of legitimate belligerent action against him, and that they originate in, and, though varying in the intensity of its action, are both linked with sea-power and the efficiency of its visible agent, the Fleet. That German commerce should have received its death-blow, that neutral merchants should have suffered in consequence, are the natural, the inevitable results of the command of the sea which in fair fighting in times past England has won for herself. But there has been introduced into the controversy an expression, the mere mention of which seems to send men’s minds dancing with unreason--the ‘Freedom of the Sea.’ Very dexterously, the Germans have substituted for it another expression, the ‘Equality of the Sea.’ In spite of the captivating simplicity of the words, it is used with sinister intent, in the hope to redress the inequality of the hostile Fleets. If a Fleet is a legitimate weapon of offence and defence for nations whose borders are on the sea, then the fortune of one aspect of war between them must rest with the superior Fleet, and when war does come the imagined equality of the sea, whether for belligerents or for neutrals who cross the track of it, vanishes.