The ‘freedom of the sea’ is a cry for something as inarticulate as the other things that the wild waves are saying. It means no more, no less, than does the freedom of the King’s highway, which is subject to a multitude of other rights often reducing it to nothing. The ingenuous pacifist sees in it the fulfilment of the promise that wars shall cease. Yet if that and all the other fanciful ideas which have gathered round it--the ‘neutralization of the sea,’ for example--come to prevail, wars will indeed cease, but in a way the pacifist least dreams of. Hidden in that imagined ‘freedom,’ and the ‘rules’ which have been suggested to ensure it, lies the power of the Strong to make one final war upon the Weak on land, and the end of it the annihilation of the Small Nations; for it means this, that when they are attacked they must defend themselves without help in munitions of war from neutral merchants across the sea. The ‘freedom of the sea’ is not even complete in time of peace, for it may not be set up by those who have violated the laws of the nations which border its shores. But when war comes the ‘freedom of the sea’ must give way to the rights of war; and no one dare _now_ deny that to declare war may be a sacred right, to decline the gage of battle an infamy. The only freedom that remains, and even this is curtailed by the right of search, is that of neutral merchants to carry on their trade with one another unmolested, so long as it does not deliberately enmesh itself in the lines and areas of battle. But it must never be forgotten that the United States is not vindicating the simple right of neutral nations to trade with one another untrammelled by belligerent action. It maintains, and all the struggles of its advocacy are devoted to establishing this proposition, that ‘innocent shipments may be freely transported to and from the United States through neutral countries to belligerent territory.’[5] Here, then, is the whole matter ‘bounded in a nut-shell.’ It is admitted that a belligerent may forcibly prevent _all_ goods going from a neutral directly to the enemy: it is admitted that he may also prevent certain specified goods (called ‘contraband of war’) going from a neutral indirectly (that is, through another neutral country) to the enemy. The United States protests that international law ends with these two propositions: that there is no underlying principle linking the two admissions, making them only two illustrations of a larger fact: that there is a chasm between them that can never be bridged, even though not merely the conditions of war, but also the constitution of armies have changed: that international law must stand at the point it reached ten years ago, and a belligerent stand passively by while neutral merchants sustain the enemy with the things which give him life to continue the fight.