MARITIME INTERNATIONAL LAW. 30I 



privateering, especially with merchants and ship-owners, who are 

 interested in maritime commerce, as well as with eminent writers 

 and authorities on international maritime law, who have forcibly 

 urged its abolition. Pre-eminent amongst distinguished writers 

 and speakers, who have strenuously laboured to achieve this 

 triumph, was Richard Cobden, whose services in the cause of 

 International Peace, and especially in the direction of the reform 

 of International Maritime Law, have been great and distinguished* 

 and claim for him the homage of all men of peace and progress. 



COMMERCIAL BLOCKADE. 



The same may, with equal force, be said in regard to the 

 right of commercial blockade, and, it is inexplicable, that Great 

 Britain, which of all nations would suffer most seriously by its 

 exercise, should be the chief obstacle to secure its abolition. On 

 account of her insulated position, and her dependence upon 

 other nations, not only for the supplies of food, but also for the 

 raw materials which minister to her great and varied manufacturing 

 industries, it is obvious that its abolition, except under the exigencies 

 of military operations, as proposed by the United States Minister, 

 Mr. Cass, in 1859, is a policy dictated alike in the interests of her 

 trade, and of her naval supremacy, as it is in the interests of 

 humanity. 



Moreover, the exercise of commercial blockade has been proved 

 by experience, to affect Great Britain as disastrously when a 

 neutral, as when a belligerent, for in the latter case, it is not 

 only a comparatively useless and ineffective weapon, but it is 

 practically abandoned by her. 



In the first case, as a neutral. During the prolonged American 

 War, Great Britain suffered commercially, industrially, and otherwise 

 most disastrously; her sufferings indeed could hardly have been 

 more severe, even had she been engaged in that sanguinary 

 struggle. 



These privations and disasters. Great Britain was herself responsible 

 for ; they were self-imposed, because, judging from the declarations 

 of the other Great Powers, represerited at the Cdngress of Paris in 

 1856, in favour of the abrogation of the right of blockade, she was 



