Now there is one fact which I should have thought would at once have disposed of the whole contention of the critics--the Protest of the United States Government. That Protest declares that in the Order in Council we have gone to lengths in interfering with American trade (which includes trade in cotton) hitherto unknown to international law, more especially in stopping that trade, asserted to be ‘innocent’ but manifestly the opposite, on its way to neutral countries. In all friendliness that Government exhorts us, among other things, to revert to the time-honoured practice of relying on declarations of contraband. It appears, therefore, that the United States Government charges us with doing precisely what our own critics condemn Ministers for not doing, except by ‘a half-hearted expedient’--stopping ‘innocent’ cargoes of cotton. That Government insists that the correct way of preventing cotton reaching the enemy is to shut ourselves up in those old watertight compartments of international law labelled ‘contraband’ and ‘blockade.’ They want to entangle us in that incomprehensible ravel of illogic into which those doctrines of international law have got themselves. Paraphrased, what the American Government says is this--declare a blockade, even though it be a ‘long-distance blockade,’ which they are willing to concede to be our right, and then we may stop all cotton going direct to German ports, though not, as the text-books point out, cotton going indirectly to Germany through neutral ports; or, declare cotton to be contraband, and then we may stop it even though it passes through neutral ports. But as we had done neither of these things _in express terms_, Germany must be allowed to get her ‘innocent’ shipments of cotton by way of neutral and contiguous ports. Verily, the American fowler spreads the net in the sight of the British bird. Here is the substance of the whole discussion. The Judges of the United States, with clear-cut thought, declared, half a century ago, that the doctrine of ‘continuous voyages’ was the inevitable complement to the belligerent right of stopping munitions of war and their component substances on the high seas on the way to the enemy. In other words, that the doctrine completed the law of contraband of war. The British Government, has, by the Order in Council, declared that doctrine equally to be the inevitable complement to the more extended belligerent right of stopping _all_ supplies from reaching the enemy. In other words, that the doctrine completes the law of what we have called the ‘new blockade.’