Page:The League of Nations and freedom of the seas.djvu/7



HE conception of a League of Nations in the shape it has taken during the past few years is marked by a feature which distinguishes it from all its predecessors. For the first time it appears to be assumed that Freedom of the Seas, or, in other words, the abolition of belligerent rights afloat, is an essential condition of such a League, and that the two ideas are inseparable, an assumption which carries the scope of recent proposals distinctly beyond the limits of those to which the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave birth.

None of those schemes ever gathered strength to rise from the ground, yet none of them ever burdened itself with such a load as those of the present day are expected to carry. Indeed Freedom of the Seas in the ordinary acceptance of the term is more than a load. A frank examination of what it connotes will show that it must be a spoke in the wheels which in all probability would prevent any conceivable machinery of a League from acting with effect. Once formed, a League of Nations may be charged with the definition of belligerent rights at sea and with control