needs, to prepare the public for the acceptance of that moderate measure of compulsion which has necessarily followed. Whom the crisis will produce as our leader among the men who have been mentioned, or others, no one can say. Nor is it possible to forecast when or how the necessary change of government will come about. The Parliament and Registration Bill, by prolonging the life of this Parliament for eight months, has done away with an opportunity, which might otherwise have automatically presented itself to the nation this January, for considering the fitness of its rulers and the possibility of an alternative. As it is, we must now wait for the collapse of the Government either from its inherent internal weakness or in face of a growing unanimity of public disapproval. But that can only be when hard experience has completed the process of weaning the public from the fond delusions in which it has acquiesced so long, and nerved it to face the bracing shock of looking steadfastly at the true aspect of things.

It is truth and leading that England needs most at this moment. We have lived far too long, like Plato's cavedwellers, in a world of shadows and shams, so long, indeed, that even now we shrink from hard facts, and peevishly resent the counsel of those who would bid us face those facts and act upon them. But the light will not hurt us, and in our hearts we know it. The surface of our national life may be cankered and corroded with makebelieve and sloth. But the core of the nation is sound, and its soundness has been proved on many a field of suffering and glory. Our so-called leaders are mere puppets, dry husks rattling on the stalk. But England only needs to feel the hand of a man at the helm, and to hear the voice of a man in her ear, in order to spring to action mightier, more enduring, more unconquerable than ever before.

Art. 15. THE DANISH AGREEMENT AND THE FEEDING OF GERMANY.

THE British Foreign Office has quite recently entered into an agreement of which the substance is that all imports into Denmark shall be consigned under the direction of two Danish trading associations, and that all re-exports into Germany of imported goods shall be prohibited save as to specified articles. Among these are certain foodstuffs which are unlimited in amount except by operation of the general modifying principle that there shall only be permitted such total imports into Denmark as constituted her customary supply prior to the war.*

The importance of these provisions in themselves may readily be magnified, even when it is remembered that foodstuffs have been declared to be conditional contraband. But when one recalls the Prime Minister's words to Parliament on March 1, 1915, and reads in the Order in Council of March 11: His Majesty has therefore decided to adopt further measures in order to prevent commodities of any kind from reaching or leaving Germany,' the phenomenon of the Foreign Office, by its signature to a formal document, assenting to the conveyance into Germany of sea-borne goods, such as coffee and tea and cocoa (albeit of Danish manufacture), creates in the mind a sense of bewildered unreality. A hundred questions arise. Has the Order in Council proved an impracticable undertaking? Has the policy of the Foreign Office changed while we knew it not? How far has the change operated; how much further will it go? Must we give up our hope of a Germany blockaded into submission? And, if this be only a necessary and partial surrender, can we in International Law so limit our concession? The significance of the Danish Agreement is therefore immense. It is a revelation of the workings of the mind of the Foreign Office; it is a landmark which, suddenly seen after long days upon a dark sea, tells of the great distances that have been traversed toward an unforeseen port.

The explanation of the course that has been laid by

* The writer has had access to a complete copy of the Agreement.

the Foreign Office will not, however, be found in the Order in Council of March 11, 1915. The secret resides in another pronouncement made just six years earlier by those who now guide the ship of State as then. The same Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs presided over the genesis of the Declaration of London and of the Danish Agreement; among the representatives of the Foreign Office who attended the London Conference was the delegate who signed the Danish Agreement on behalf of Great Britain. Sir Edward Grey wrote to the British Plenipotentiary at the Conference:

'For the purposes of blockade... the destination justifying capture is that of the ship and not of the cargo; and a vessel whose final destination is a neutral port cannot, unless she endeavours, before reaching that destination, to enter a blockaded port, be condemned for breach of blockade, although her cargo may be ear-marked to proceed in some other way to the blockaded coast. . . . His Majesty's Government see no reason for departing from that practice, and you should endeavour to obtain general recognition of its correctness.'

The delegates from the Foreign Office attending the Conference wrote as follows:

'It seems doubtful whether, under the conditions of modern commerce, the strictly legitimate exercise of the right to seize goods destined for the armed forces of the enemy, regardless of the enemy or neutral character of the port where the goods are to be landed, confers any far-reaching advantage on a State at war with a continental country which can freely draw its supplies from neighbouring neutral territories. It would always be easy, in the case of conditional contraband, which, unlike absolute contraband, does not, by its very nature, suggest the use to which it will be put, to evade all liability to capture by consigning such goods to neutral ports under conditions which would make it practically impossible for capture to prove their final destination. It may therefore be said that the benefit derived by a State, when belligerent, from the right to apply the doctrine of continuous voyage to a shipment of conditional contraband is narrowly limited in cases where the enemy territory is easily accessible through neutral ports, and is largely balanced, if not outweighed, by the interest which such State, as a neutral, would have in a definite prohibition of any belligerent molestation of the trade between two

neutral ports, except trade in absolute contraband. . . . It is only as regards countries having no maritime frontier that the doctrine of continuous voyage has been unanimously acknowledged to remain applicable in respect to both absolute and conditional contraband.'

It is, of course, apparent that the delegates who thus thought and wrote never contemplated a situation in which they would be called upon to prevent commodities of any kind from reaching or leaving Germany.' It is equally apparent that no reconcilement is possible between the views and declarations of March 1909 and those of March 1915.

The Declaration of London provides as follows:

'Preliminary Provision. The Signatory Powers are agreed that the rules contained in the following chapters correspond in substance with the generally recognised principles of International Law.

'Art. 1. A blockade must not extend beyond the ports and coasts belonging to or occupied by the enemy.

'Art. 35. Conditional contraband is not liable to capture, except when found on board a vessel bound for territory belonging to or occupied by the enemy, or for the armed forces of the enemy, and when it is not to be discharged in an intervening neutral port.'

Foodstuffs could not, therefore, under the provisions above stated, either by the declaration of the blockade, or by their designation as conditional contraband, have been prevented from reaching Germany. It is, therefore, of the gravest significance that Lord Crewe should have stated in the House of Lords on Dec. 20 that the Prime Minister's memorable speech of March last must be construed as 'subject to the accepted principles of International Law, and that what he intended was that within those principles every conceivable effort should be made to prevent goods that mattered either entering or leaving Germany.' Why then did the Prime Minister speak in March of cutting through juridical niceties'? What possible significance in the light of this explanation had this phrase? And why say 'commodities of every kind' if one meant only 'goods that mattered'? There is, therefore, presented the following series of logical dilemmas :

(1) The Prime Minister in March 1915 had no such intention of limiting his words, and the official apologist spoke without consultation and authority;

(2) The Prime Minister in March 1915 accepted the controlling force of the Preliminary Provision of the Declaration of London, and intended by a suppressed, modifying clause to nullify the force of his expressed undertaking;

(3) The Prime Minister in March 1915 proposed to repudiate the Preliminary Provision of that Declaration, and to disagree with the British Delegates who had written: We obtained recognition of the fact... that as a body these rules have amounted practically to a statement of what is the essence of the law of nations properly applicable to the questions at issue under present-day conditions of maritime commerce and warfare.'

(4) The Prime Minister meant precisely what he said in March 1915, but the Government has departed from the terms of his declaration, and now with his acquiescence seeks to put a different intention upon his words.

Such conditions and such alternatives indicate the significance of the Danish Agreement. To understand it, is to comprehend Foreign Office policy and the recent course of international trade developments. But behind these lies the whole history of maritime international law; and one must endeavour to envisage the problem presented to the nations, both neutral and belligerent, when the decision embodied in the Order in Council of March 1915 was made.

It is proposed to consider, without any attempt at technical definition, the general principles accepted during the 18th century, the modifications and proposals of modifications caused by the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War, the changed commercial conditions of to-day, and the attempts at solution of the vital problems so created.

Prior to the Napoleonic wars, several principles were generally accepted, among which were:

1. The right of a neutral (in the absence of a blockade) to trade with a belligerent in goods (a) non-contraband, (b) not destined for the armed forces of the enemy. In