Now, seeing that the Order pays so great regard to the pocket of the neutral merchant that it does not condemn _his_ non-contraband cargoes, it is very difficult to discover any justification for protest. Shorn of superfluity of words, the complaint is that we have not declared a blockade; and it resolves itself into this: that we ought to seize and condemn neutral cargoes and not rest satisfied with what may be termed an interim seizure, which may not become absolute. The answer is that the existence and extent of a right does not depend on the nature of the procedure by which it is enforced. It is true that international law has invented a fiction to assist the belligerent who decides to declare a blockade; it preserves, _as against the neutral merchant_, the ‘evident danger of seizure’ even when owing to stress of weather it has ceased not merely to be evident, but to exist altogether. What can this fiction have to do with the nature of the right to which it is a mere adjunct? The right to stop _all_ supplies going to the enemy. It is preposterous to say that a belligerent cannot exercise this right unless he avails himself of the adventitious assistance which the law offers him; that although he _can_ do without it yet he _may_ not. * * * * * What is true of the deep sea must also be true of the high air. When the lorries and cargo-carriers of the air have come into being, and the war in the air becomes even more of a grim reality than it is to-day, neutrals carrying supplies to the enemy will, I imagine, receive short shrift, contraband or no contraband, siege or no siege, blockade or no blockade. _The Sovereignty over Neutral Ships_ But the United States Government rests its protest on an alternative ground. The Order in Council, it declares, would constitute, were its provisions to be actually carried into effect as they stand, a practical assertion of unlimited belligerent rights over neutral commerce within the whole European area, and an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace. * * * * * This Government takes it for granted that there can be no question what those rights are. A nation’s sovereignty over its own ships and citizens under its own flag on the high seas in time of peace is, of course, unlimited. And that sovereignty suffers no diminution in times of war except in so far as the practice and consent of civilised nations have limited it by the recognition of certain now clearly determined rights which it is conceded may be exercised by nations which are at war.