than with the power which possessed the command of the sea. As that enviable position was held practically without interruption by Great Britain, and as in time of war she used unsparingly the advantages her position gave her, she gained in the eyes of opponent and neutral the reputation of being the enemy of freedom of the seas. At the beginning of the Seven Years' War France, realizing that she would not be able to control the trade with her colonies, threw it open to neutrals. Great Britain thereupon laid down her famous "Rule of 1756" that commerce illegal in time of peace was not legal in time of war, and attacked neutral ships found trading with French colonies. The answer of Denmark and Sweden to this policy was the formation of the first league of neutrals to protect neutral commerce. The French, hoping that the contrast of their policy with that of Great Britain would help their cause with neutral powers, were careful not to authorize interference with neutral trade. It is interesting to find the doctrine of which we have heard so much of late, of the menace of British "navalism," formulated in the eighteenth century by the minister of a state which, like England's opponent in the twentieth, was stronger on land than on the sea. It was a French diplomat who expressed the hope that some day a union of nations would be able to cope with England and "establish firmly after the peace, or even during the war, a balance of commerce: for without it no other people will ever enjoy any but a precarious navigation, which will last only as long as it is to the interest of the English government not to destroy it." This statement owes its significance to the fact that it voiced the attitude of a government which, under stress of circumstances, indeed, and not because it saw a light, was departing from the prevailing practice of mercantilism, the reservation for nationals of the benefits of colonial trade. * * * * * A British statesman has recently made the assertion that the United States owes its existence to the struggle for the freedom of the seas. He was referring to the Elizabethan struggle against Spain's policy of exclusion, but is not the statement true also in another sense? In so far as the restrictions laid upon the development of the colonies by the trade and navigation laws contributed in bringing about the American Revolution, that movement was a protest against the mercantile system, under which no freedom of the seas was possible.