enemy's army being starved, it refuses to allow the "innocent"that is, the non-combatants-to be starved.

This is the extreme of absurdity. The complexities of modern warfare make it impossible to differentiate between combatants and "non-combatants." The man, woman, or child working in the Krupp factory in Essen is as much a combatant as the Prussian private in the trenches in France. The private fires a rifle, and if his aim is good, he kills a British or French or Belgian soldier; yes, but with what?-with the cartridge that is the handiwork of the men, women, and children working in the Krupp factory in Essen. The theory of “non-combatant” seems to collapse here.

The conductor who is today in charge of a freight train of cotton en route to a mill to be converted into explosives, is a "non-combatant," whose starvation is a crime. But tomorrow he is called to the colors as a reservist, and thus he may be starved, because he is a combatant. A schoolboy's debating club would laugh at a proposition so illogical.

Germany would like to enjoy "the freedom of the seas" while denying that freedom to other nations. In torpedoing neutral merchant vessels and giving their crews and passengers no chance to escape, Germany has violated the fundamental law of nations that the sea is free to all neutrals, and a vessel may be destroyed only after adequate provision has been made for the protection of life.

The purpose of a blockade is threefold. It is (1) to prevent the enemy from receiving those articles of military necessity without which it cannot prosecute the war; (2) to prevent the importation of food if the country is not able to furnish food for the support of its army and civil population from its own resources; (3) to prevent the enemy from engaging in commerce. All three purposes are designed to accomplish the same end. If the enemy cannot obtain military supplies, its offensive is weakened and its resistance breaks down. If the enemy is placed on short rations, its moral and physical strength is impaired. If it cannot trade, its financial power is crippled, and beggary forces the surrender of its armies.

To the emotional, this may sound very dreadful; and it is very dreadful. Slowly to strangle a nation to death, to weaken its power of resistance, to enfeeble it by hunger, to impoverish it these things move pity. But war, as it has been observed,

is brutal business, and while the neutral may be moved by contemplating its horrors and may with propriety try to mitigate them, no neutral may or should interfere in what is clearly not its concern. To do so, I repeat-and it cannot be too often repeated because of the erroneous views entertained-is to strip the neutral of neutrality and make him an ally.

The cry raised by Germany that it is inhuman, and against all precedent in civilized warfare, to starve the non-combatant population, I deny on three grounds.

First, I deny its inhumanity. It is, on the contrary, the most humane way of conducting war. When people feel the pangs of hunger they will no longer fight, and the war can sooner be brought to an end by hunger than it can in any other way. It is more humane to make people experience the discomforts of short rations (it is dishonest to talk about their being "starved," as if they were actually in danger of dying from want of nourishment) than to kill them with bullets, or cause them to suffer the awful agony of suffocation from gas, or to wound them and compel them to drag out the rest of their lives crippled, blind, tortured by their wounds, a misery to themselves and a charge upon relatives or charity.

Second, I deny the existence of "non-combatants." For the reasons I have already given, practically the entire population of the German Empire may be said to be fighting, either in the field or in the factory. A neutral who joins the armed forces of a belligerent, according to international law, forfeits his neutrality. A German, man or woman, who contributes to the fighting efficiency of Germany, loses his or her status as a noncombatant. Neither law nor morality will recognize a dual relation: a combatant for the profit of Germany, and a noncombatant so that the individual may escape the rigors of war.

Third, I deny that a blockade to prevent a civilian population obtaining food is without precedent in modern warfare; and for that precedent I refer the reader to the American Civil War. President Lincoln's blockade of the Confederacy had a double purpose: to prevent the exportation of cotton, which was the only means by which the South could raise money; and to prevent the importation of foodstuffs, medical supplies, and articles of military necessity. In all history there is no greater lover of humanity than Lincoln, no man with a heart more tender, no man with a deeper love for his fellow man;

and yet Lincoln put in force a blockade that slowly but very surely strangled the South; that paralyzed it financially and brought its people to know the meaning of hunger. He did this because of his humanity; because, terrible as were the sufferings of the South, they were less dreadful than slaughter and the human wreckage of war. And in that day, there were, in fact as well as in name, non-combatants. There were no great factories in which women and children worked turning out shells and cartridges and high explosives; the places of the men withdrawn from industrial pursuits were not filled by women; trade came to an absolute standstill, for when the men left field or forge or factory the women could not supplant them.

Does anyone believe that if Germany had been able to destroy the British fleet, and the coasts of England were under blockade and her people were being reduced to surrender by starvation, Germany would be the champion of "the freedom of the seas"? Germany has openly announced that that is what she is attempting to do-to starve England into surrender. That, she has said, is the purpose of her submarine warfare—to cut off the food supplies of England, Great Britain not being selfsustaining and having to rely on other countries to feed her people.

Germany having met defeat on the sea, now invokes the aid of the neutral nations to bring about "the freedom of the seas." Having been unable to destroy the British navy by gunfire she would destroy its usefulness by diplomacy. It is the British navy that stands between Germany and the food she does or does not need, but which she seems so anxious to secure, the cotton which America alone can supply, and the numerous other articles neutral nations would willingly sell if German ports were not barred by British cruisers. What Germany cannot do by her own strength the world is to do for her; the world, calling itself neutral, is to give the lie to its professions of neutrality by nullifying the advantage England possesses through superior naval strength.

An idea that is fantastic, dishonest, or dangerous will always commend itself to a certain type of mind if it is clothed in the garments of rhetoric or can be made to serve morality and appeal to self-interest. "The freedom of the seas" can be made to serve two masters, Mammon and Righteousness. The neutral trader, instead of being incommoded by war, would

greatly profit by it, as there would be no interference with trade, and the inevitable effect of war is to enhance commodity prices, so that self-interest would be served. Blockades being outlawed and so-called non-contraband goods immune from seizure, sea power would lose its former importance, and the world would no longer be shocked by witnessing the seizure of a ship attempting to carry goods of prime military necessity to a blockaded belligerent. Why some persons should regard it as peculiarly immoral for a cruiser to seize a merchant vessel trying to trade with the enemy, but find no violation of morality if the same goods are seized on land, it is not easy to say, but they do.

This is the explanation of Germany's anxiety to secure "the freedom of the seas," and is the meaning of the propaganda now being carried on in the United States. If blockades are no longer sanctioned and so-called "private property" rights in cargoes are recognized, Germany, after the conclusion of peace, need spend less money on her navy and have very much more to spend on her army, on building even larger guns than those she now has, and creating greater reserves of arms and ammunition than she had when war was declared last year. But it is a principle that the serious and matured thought of neither the United States nor Great Britain will accept, as it would immeasurably weaken the defensive power of both countries, and would mean the reckless abandonment of a weapon on which both nations must rely for defense.

That the United States may be involved in war is a contingency not to be dismissed lightly or regarded as impossible, for in history nothing is impossible. If the United States were at war the result might be determined by two things-its power effectively to blockade the coast of its enemy, and its power to prevent the enemy from being supplied by neutrals. The United States is the one country that is self-contained. It can rely on its own resources to furnish all the food it needs; out of the earth it can dig coal, copper, iron, and the other minerals on which war feeds; cotton is the yield of its fields; all the guns and munitions and everything else necessary to warfare, its own skilled workmen could create. The United States might be blockaded, if such a thing were possible, and its people would know none of the horrors of famine or have to deny themselves either necessity or luxury.

Enjoying by the grace of fortune such superb advantages, is it conceivable that American statesmen would consider, or the American people permit, their sacrifice in obedience to the demand of the false prophets, the sentimentalists, the theorists, who, meaning well, do the most harm because their vision is clouded and they live in a maze?

No, "the freedom of the seas" in time of war is impossible, because it is a perversion of both the human and natural law, the law that enables the man or the animal endowed with superior advantages to use them for protection when life is at stake.

NEUTRALIZATION OF THE SEA1

This is written by a man of English descent whose youth and early manhood were passed in America, who there acquired a deep sympathy and admiration for most that America represents, who believes, further, that America might, if she seized her opportunities, play a leading rôle in giving a new development to organized society by becoming the pivot of its worldwide organization on more civilized lines, and who sees all this placed in jeopardy by possibility of a very serious cleavage of policy as between herself and England. This cleavage is the more serious because in England its existence even is hardly realized and its real cause in no way discussed. Attempts at bridging it are, in consequence, the more liable to grave misunderstandings.

Let me outline the difference very briefly. A bitter feeling has grown up in England, owing to the impression that in the interest of a trade in copper or cotton, America, oblivious to all other considerations, is, or was, prepared to enforce her point of view even to the extent of ranging herself on the side of England's enemies. This monstrous assumption is for the moment put into the background by a half-hope that Germaany's submarine blockade may now cause America to come over on the side of the Allies. Such, broadly, indicates English feeling and discussion. The Spectator-most pro-American of English journals has been drawing disturbing parallels with the Trent affair, promising that in the forthcoming discussions "we shall

1 By Norman Angell. Reprinted from the North American Review, May 1915, p. 694-701,