Page:Handbook of maritime rights.djvu/90

76 which it was stipulated that enemies' goods should be seizable in neutral bottoms. Moreover, within ten years of this first armed neutrality, there was not one nation which had joined it which did not turn round and adopt the exactly opposite maxims. Sweden, Spain. Russia herself! Portugal, Naples, Austria, and Prussia! And Russia actually (1794) quarrelled with Denmark—threatening war and ordering her cruisers to employ force,—because Denmark raised pretensions of not allowing her merchantmen, that were sailing under convoy, to be searched. But what perhaps best reveals the true motives of policy of the authors of the armed neutrality was that the Empress Catherine, who was at the head of it and the moving spirit in it, actually had no mercantile navy and no neutral navigation to protect, and consequently was least of all the Rulers in Europe entitled to promulgate a new law on the subject, in opposition to the