P.S.--I take this opportunity of referring to the American reply to the Austrian Note which complained that the sale of munitions of war by United States merchants to the Allies was a breach of neutrality on the part of the United States Government. The Note was in the forcible-feeble style. It gave me the impression of having been written to order of the German Government by men who had not much belief in the soundness of their argument. It very clearly showed that necessity ‘knows no law,’ for erroneous doctrine was assuredly never so weakly stated. But it gave President Wilson an occasion of finally disposing of the false, and of asserting the true, principles of neutrality. It disposes also of the notion prevalent in some quarters, to which I referred in the second article, that the President’s ‘sense of fairness’[54] had something to do with our continuing to receive munitions of war from the United States. The reply has not been much noticed, but it deserves transcription as a most masterly statement of law and policy: ‘The principles of international law, the practice of nations, the national safety of the United States and other nations without great military and naval establishments, the prevention of increased armies and navies, the adoption of peaceful methods for the adjustment of international differences, and, finally, neutrality itself, are opposed to the prohibition by a neutral nation of the exportation of arms and ammunition or other munitions of war to belligerent Powers during the progress of the War.’ I draw special attention to the sentence ‘the national safety of the United States and other nations without great military and naval establishments’; these are the nations, small in their powers of defence, who, as I have pointed out, must go to the wall if the wild dream of neutralizing the sea should ever be allowed to materialise.[55] FOOTNOTES: [1] The _caveat_ of the United States Government, published in _The Times_, 24th July, 1915. This action is considered in the second article, at p. 90. [2] The book recently published by the French Foreign Office setting forth the crimes of the German Government is, with great and customary accuracy, entitled ‘Les violations des Lois de la Guerre par l’Allemagne.’ [3] As by the sinking of a merchantman on which its citizens are travelling, without warning and without affording them proper means of escape, or by the dropping of bombs on an unfortified town in which its citizens are residing. If such neutral citizens are injured, elementary legal principles deprive the belligerent, become barbarian, of the plea that he did not know of their existence. [4] See the footnote on p. 95. [5] See p. 85.