Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/94

 Blockades. fessed to%be at peace with Turkey (under whose control Greece then was); and from '45 to '48 France and England prevented ac cess to La Plata (Argentina), although no war was declared. To admit such procedure as legitimate, would simply mean that one State might put in force against another measures destructive of the trade of neutral countries, and yet expect those countries to view the whole operation as pacific. In truth "pacific blockade" is a contradiction in terms, and the sole reason why it has not met with the unanimous disapproval of the whole civilized world is that up to now it has been leveled against only the weaker nations. In practice, it is enforced by the same meth ods as blockade between belligerents. In 1886 Great Britian adopted a novel form of pacific blockade against Greece. Every ship flying the flag of any nation except Greece, was unmolested. But the liberty al lowed to other nations did nothing to miti gate the coercion applied to Greek trading vessels, and had the object of the blockade been merely to divert to British ships the carrying trade of Greece, a measure better fitted to attain that end could scarcely have been devised. From time immemorial it had been consid ered a perfectly regular proceeding to de clare a port or a territory under blockade, and to affix a penalty for a violation of the declaration, although in point of fact, not a single vessel should be present to enforce its observance. But gradually this tenet met with less toleration; and in 1780, when America and France were combined against England, the three great powers of the North, Russia, Denmark and Sweden, en tered into a league known as the "Armed Neutrality," with the object of evading the severe but ancient method of dealing with neutral commerce which England adopted. One of the articles which this confederacy agreed upon was : "A port is blockaded only when evident danger attends the attempts to

run into it"—a principle which boldly denied the right of anv power to close by a mere edict a single hostile port. But England per sisted in the exercise of a right which had undoubtedly the sanction of custom; and the powers of Europe wrangled through still darker years before an agreement could be reached. On the 2ist of November, 1806, Napoleon promulgated the famous Berlin de cree, which announced that every port in Great Britain was blockaded, and by an Order in Council issued a year afterwards, the British government declared France and all her possessions subject to the same em bargo. Both governments, however, were simply carrying to its logical issue the old doctrine which neither had renounced—that a valid blockade might be constituted by mere notification. It was only in 1856 that, with the express purpose of removing as far as possible the uncertainty which hung over the rules of naval war, the great powers, except the United States, Spain and Mexico, concurred in the Declaration of Paris, which has been described as "a sort of doctrinal annex" to the treaty of that year. Important as has been the operation of all the rules con tained in that Declaration, the only one which concerns us here is the fourth: "Blockades in order to be binding must be effective—that is to say, maintained by a force sufficiently real to prevent access to the enemy.1' This, being practically an adoption of the principle for which the neutrals of 1780 had so strenuously contended, was a triumph for those thinkers who have always main tained that all law must rest upon a basis of fact. The first fifteen years of the nineteenth cen tury were marked by all that turbulence which had characterized the closing years of that which went before, and there were not wanting in both periods instances of block ades perseveringly prosecuted and gallantly resisted. In the year 1800, Genoa was the .only city in Italy held by the French. The