Page:The League of Nations and freedom of the seas.djvu/13

 meant so much for the liberties of the world, would be upset, and the voice of the Naval Powers would sink to a whisper beside that of the Military Powers. If this is the forbidding situation to which a League of Nations is to lead—and there is no avoiding it if it is to be clogged with full Freedom of the Seas—how can it be expected that the Great Naval Powers will consent to become parties to it? Yet it is amongst those Powers that are found the most weighty and convinced advocates of a League of Nations. Without their cordial support such a League can never be formed, and that is one reason why, if we persist in coupling the League with Freedom of the Seas, we lay upon it a load it can never lift.

But it is not the only reason. For even if we assume that the League could be formed with this difficult condition attached to it, it would still find itself deprived of the most effective means of attaining its end. All schemes for a League of Nations contemplate some form of sanction by which recalcitrant Powers can be coerced, and of all these sanctions the one that is at once the most readily applied and the most immediate and humane in its action is to deny to the offender the Freedom of the Seas, to pronounce against him a sea interdict. To kill, or even seriously to hamper, a nation's commercial activity at sea has always been a potent means of bringing it to reason, even when national life was far less dependent on sea-borne trade than it is now. At the present time,