PREFACE xiii 



embark them off the Isle of Wight without 

 paying full harbour dues to the port of South- 

 ampton. German ships were allowed to carry 

 British mails and to take them up and put them 

 ashore off the Isle of Wight in a way which 

 strained the provisions of British regulations. 

 I made this statement to the President of the 

 Board of Trade and to the Secretary of State 

 for the Colonies at the Colonial Office on 

 April 3, 1916, and it has never been contradicted. 

 When considering, therefore, the disputes of 

 the seventeenth century in which Grotius and 

 Selden were the protagonists, the student must 

 bear in mind that the words " Freedom of the 

 Seas,^' as used to-day by our present enemies, 

 have for Britain an entirely different meaning 

 from that put upon them in the " Mare liberum " 

 and " Mare clausum " arguments. Such being 

 the case our business is, as Blake said in 1653, to 

 keep foreigners from fooling us, and to remem- 

 ber Selden's observation that the English 

 people are many times in treaties overmatched 

 by them whom they overmatch in arms. 



And there are other points to be considered. 



The modern gun will carry twenty miles, 

 and as the three-mile limit was presumably 

 based on the range of a gun being under three 

 miles, the limit of what ought to be considered 

 territorial waters has become obsolete, or at 

 all events inapplicable to modern conditions. 

 Again, such questions as the use of sunk mines 

 for coast defence, the submersion of a submarine 



