24 MOORE— CONTRABAND OF WAR. [Februarys, 



blockade, although it once assumed immense proportions, to a great 

 extent lost its importance when the principle was established that 

 blockades in order to be legally valid must be effective, that is to 

 say, maintained by a force sufficient to prevent access to the block- 

 aded port or at least to render such access dangerous. Since the 

 definite and universal acceptance of this principle, by which neutral 

 commerce was relieved of the hazards to which it was formerly 

 exposed from measures generically designated by the evil name of 

 " paper blockades," the conflict between belligerent right and neutral 

 right has been carried on chiefly in the domain of contraband, to 

 which it may be said that all the legal uncertainties that formerly 

 attended the subject of blockade have been transferred, with many 

 additions and aggravations. 



In order to demonstrate the paramount importance of the ques- 

 tion of contraband, it is unnecessary to do more than point out that, 

 if the claim of capture on this ground be not properly limited, the 

 two great safeguards of neutral rights established after generations 

 of conflict become utterly worthless. I refer to the rule that free 

 ships make free goods and the rule that blockades must be effect- 

 ively maintained. 



First, let us consider the rule that free ships make free goods. 

 By what has been called the common law of the sea, the goods of an 

 enemy were subject to capture and confiscation without regard to 

 the character of the ship in which they were borne. The enforce- 

 ment of this rule necessarily involved the capture and bringing in 

 of neutral vessels whose cargoes were alleged to be composed even 

 in small part of the goods of a belligerent. The breaking up of the 

 voyages of neutral vessels in this manner, with all the resultant 

 losses, involved so much hardship to carriers in no way concerned 

 in the conflict that, as early as the seventeenth century, there sprang 

 up an agitation for the exemption of neutral vessels from molesta- 

 tion for carrying goods which happened to belong to a citizen of a 

 belligerent country. Such an exemption gradually came to be em- 

 bodied in treaties; and when on February 28, 1780, the Empress 

 Catherine of Russia issued her celebrated manifesto, which formed 

 the basis of the Armed Neutrality, she announced this principle: 



