“Illegal, Ineffective and Indefensible Blockades.”—The World War has evolved principles of warfare, upset practices and sanctioned acts that place war in a new aspect, present it as a new physical problem, like the discovery of a new planet. So many laboriously achieved understandings, agreements and principles of international law were swept overboard that the world must begin its efforts all over, if humanity is to regain the rights which it had slowly wrested from reluctant power during four or five centuries.

The outstanding fact is the recognition of the right of a belligerent power to compel another to surrender by the starvation of its civil population.

If this object were obtainable by direct blockade of the nation to be starved there would be some latitude for discussion; but when attainable only by so controlling the food supply of neutral nations as to leave them no alternative but to starve themselves or to help starve the power to be coerced, a new problem is created which will recur to vex those who sanctioned it.

During the Civil War we sent food to the starving mill operatives of England who were exposed to famine by the war, although English-built and equipped privateers were destroying our commerce, and England was actively supporting our enemies in other ways. Germany sent us food, chemicals, goods, shoes and necessary supplies in one of the most needful stages of the war, for non-contraband supplies were recognized as immune from seizure or destruction.

A blockade is illegal unless it is effective in blockading the point named. The blockading of a whole nation and the rejection of the immunity character of non-contraband supplies intended for the civil population, down to the furnishings of the Red Cross, is an English expedient and a product of the late war, though the same policy was tentatively tried in England’s war against the Boer republics.

We held that such blockade was illegal, for in the note of October21, 1915, our State Department said: “There is no better settled principle of law of nations than that which forbids the blockade of neutral points in time of war,” and we reminded the British government that Sir Edward Grey said to the British delegates to the “Conference assembled at London upon the invitation of the British government,” that:

A blockade must be confined to the ports and coasts of the enemy, but it may be instituted at one port or at several ports or at the whole of the seaboard of the enemy. It may be instituted to prevent the ingress only or egress only, or both.

And because England had violated these and numerous other principles, agreements, covenants and pledges we said to her:

“It has been conclusively shown that the methods sought to be employed by Great Britain to obtain and use evidence of enemy destination of cargoes bound for neutral ports and impose a contraband character upon such cargoes are without justification; that the blockade upon which such methods are partly founded is ineffective, illegal and indefensible.... The United States, therefore, cannot submit to the curtailment of its neutral rights by these measures, which are admittedly retaliatory, and therefore illegal in conception and in nature, and intended to punish the enemies of Great Britain for alleged illegalities on their part.”

But the State Department surrendered to the contentions of England. We submitted to countless outrages (see extract from Senator Chamberlain’s speech under “England Threatens United States”); we made it unpleasant for native Americans who determined to send non-contraband goods across the seas; approved England’s assumption of dictatorial control of the commerce of Holland and Scandinavia and held that Germany was equally our enemy as England’s on the ground that in using her submarines to sink merchant vessels feeding England she had violated our rights to the free use of the seas.

In thus abandoning cardinal principles which made us a great nation and recognizing as effective, legal and justified, England’s blockade of neutral nations, her right to confiscate non-contraband goods, to search and deprive Red Cross surgeons of their instruments, rifle our mail, remove American citizens from neutral vessels and incarcerate them, prevent Red Cross supplies from reaching the civil population and to do all the things we said she should not do, we have surrendered to Great Britain rights, powers and privileges that can hardly be justified unless we are about to dissolve our political institutions and merge ourselves with England as one people—two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.

The point is that future wars will not be decided by the usual engines of war, but by the starvation of the civil population; this invests the nation having the largest fleet with a terrible weapon of annihilation; it makes England the arbiter of nations—it compels us to compact our own terrible power of destruction, for in making food the sine qua non of victory, fate has given us a factor of far-reaching importance. And how will a nation menaced with extinction by famine retaliate? Will the inevitable consequence be that the nation so threatened will meet starvation with the subtle poison germs of a malignant plague?