8 
LAND fir" WATER 
December 12, 1918 
relieve the pressure on the town. If the army is defeated, 
the town, with its civiUan population, will be surrendered to 
the attackers, but the lives, limbs, and property of the civihans 
will be safe. But unless the inhabited place comes thus 
into the military scheme it .may not be attacked. It is 
because the air-raids on London and the sea bombardments 
of Whitby, Scarborough, and Yarmouth were not part of the 
military operation of seizing these points of advantage — were, 
in fact, nothing but random attempts to terrify and murder 
the civilian population — that they were rightly resented as 
breaches of the civilised rules of war. 
Force, then, may not be apj^lied directly to attacking non- 
combatants. But it can be applied to begin that paralysis 
which defeat and invasion would make complete. It can be 
used to prevent non-combatants holding communication with 
the outside world and drawing supplies from without by the 
operation known as siege. If this straitens the condition of 
the non-combatants, if it causes them to starve and perish 
^y starving, it is not held to be a bre;u;h of the humane rules 
of war, for two reasons. ' In the first place, the constraint is 
inflicted on all civilians equally. It is not torture, death, 
miser}' inflicted upon a small number, whom chance has 
put within reach of the attackers' guns or other weapons. 
It is a measure taken against the whole community, and as 
it is in the community as a whole that the national will 
resides, it is a direct attack on the highest command — the 
source of the courage and fighting spirit of the nation. The 
constraint of siege, then, is impartial and attacks the nation 
universally. 
But when we go back to our definition of war — the con- 
flict of armed forces decided by the victory of one over the 
other — we realise a second justification for siege. Siege is 
only possible to the attacking side when the armed force, 
subjected to attack, refuses to come out to fight and conceals 
itself behind defences. If siege results in the national sur- 
render, the attacking force has gained the same end as it 
would have gained by battle. By the renunciation of battle, 
the defenders have compelled the attackers to proceed to 
the legitimate purpose of war by the only alternative method. 
If the siege threatens to become intolerable and the besieged 
nation does not wish to surrender from mere exhaustion, 
then it may compel the armed forces to leave its defences, 
and decide the issue by battle. Siege has then justified 
itself by forcing the enemy and its battle he was 
trying to evade. The true justification of siege is, then, 
that it is first the sole alternative to battle, and, secondly, 
the only way of compelling battle, when battle is refused. 
And it is justifiable because, if it achieves the last result, it 
hastens the end of the war. 
If it is granted that siege is legitimate, is it not implied 
that for a nation at war to get help from nations not at war 
is legitimate also ? For the one arises out of the other. 
Hence, the non-belligerents, who before the siege were bring- 
ing aid and comfort, were within their rights and committing 
no offence against — though doing a disservice to — the party 
that, by siege, terminates their operations. The matter is 
wholly outside th? field of right and wrong, of tort and injury. 
It is a matter which is either possible and therefore per- 
missible, or prevented and therefore impossible. It is force 
in operation that decides it. If a nation can keep its com- 
munications open it is entitled to receive, and the neutral is 
entitled to give, all the help that the purse of one and the 
resources of the other permit. But it follows from that 
that where the attacking force can prevent this traffic, the 
neutral who was cut off from it suffers as little moral injury 
as he was inflicting. 
Siege by Blockade 
Now, in theory, what distinction can be made between 
the operation of force on land and at sea that should in any 
way limit the full pressure of siege on one element, wlien it is 
permitted on the other ? Clearly no humanitarian argument 
based upon the sufferings of those who are the victims of 
the privation wliich siege inflicts. Clearly again none upon 
' the deprivation of profit to which the neutral, who was 
profiting by tliis traffic, must now resign herself. The argu- 
ment can only be that the seas being no man's land, there is 
an inherent right of way across them which cannot be im- 
peached or stopped with justice. 
But a very cursory examination of the practice of all 
nations in war shows that this argument is no more valid 
than that based upon the sanctity of private property. For 
if there is one universally accepted principle it is that an 
enemy's ports may be blockaded. Blockade, to be acknow- 
ledged as such, must comply with strict conditions. It must be 
effective, impartial, constant. It must be such that it cannot be 
• evaded or ignored. The stoppage it imposes on shipping must 
be complete. If blockade rights are to be accorded to the 
belligerent there must be no intermission in the maintenance 
of the requisite force. So far as I know, no country has ever 
maintained that there was a common human right to use the sea 
wrongly violated by the operation of blockade. And the ad- 
mission of blockade is nothing more or less than an acknowledg- 
ment that where strength is absolute, viz., constant, effective, 
and impartial, there must at sea be accorded to it the reward 
always allowed to it on land, viz., the complete stoppage of 
communications. 
Now, why, if the principle is admitted in the case of 
blockade, should it be disputed in the case of an isolated 
warship encountering an isolated neutral merchantman ? At 
the point of contact, the absolute and effective strength of 
the warship presents to the merchantman an obstacle to his 
progress, of exactly the same character and nature as the 
same warsliip when a unit of the blockading force. The 
only point of difference is that the ship attempting to run the 
blockade inwards or outwards, is, for practical purposes, 
certain to encounter the warship, whereas in the open sea the 
watch maintained by cruisers may be ineffective, both in 
certain areas and at certain times, so that cruiser interference 
with neutral trade mav here largely be a matter of chance 
and accident. The neutral, in other words, if he embarks 
upon the adventure of trying to run the blockade, starts 
with the knowledge that the chances are twenty to one 
against him. But at the time when the rules of sea war 
were first made — and first disputed — when he started across 
the ocean, vkith a view to entering a non-blockaded port, 
his chances of evading the enemy's cruisers might well be 
still longer in his favour. At the very foundation, then, of the 
objection which the neutral sets up against cruiser interfer- 
ence is impatience with a method of war which, being uncer- 
tain and fortuitous, was therefore exasperating. And if it 
irritated the neutral to feel that when he was captured he was 
the victim of sheer ill-luck, so, too, it irritated those, whose 
national well-being suffered by his escape, to find that the 
national force was not adequate for the neutral's intercep- 
tion to become almost as much a matter of course as his 
impeachment by blockade. It was these considerations that 
led to that highly unsatisfactory method of war known as 
privateering — when the right of prize was, so to speak, 
farmed out to speculators, whose military moral was very 
far from ensuring that the humane rules of war would always 
be observed. 
Siege by Cruiser 
If the world comes now to a reconsideration of the rules 
of sea war, it is as well that people should realise how com- 
pletely the entire problem has changed by the development 
of steam navigation. It was a matter of surprise to many 
at the opening of hostilities, not only that the sea service 
of German merchant ships terminated instantly and auto- 
matically at the outbreak of war, but that not a single Ger- 
man warship outside of the North Sea ever entered a German 
port and that only one German warship returned to the 
North Sea ports from outside. 
Never in previous history had the command of the sea — 
so far as it is determined and exercised by surface craft — 
been so absolutely asserted and so completely yielded 
in war. 
It was the pace of ships, combined with the reach of tele- 
graphic information, that effected this enormous revolution. 
But the application of these changed conditions to the 
exercise of the right of visit and search has been even more 
striking. A week ago the First Lord of the Admiralty, 
speaking of the achievements of the loth Cruiser Squadron, 
pointed out the extraordinary scope of its operations, and 
the trivial percentage of the ships that, having to pass through 
its cruising line, escaped its vigilance. What, in effect, does 
this show ? Nothing less than that the old distinction be- 
tween blockade, and the less certain and regular cruiser method 
of checking the operations of neutral traffic has now practic- 
ally, ceased to exist. Indeed, it will probably be found that 
the percentage of ships that could evade even a widely 
scattered service of modern fast cruisers would be very much 
smaller than the percentage that slipped through the blockade, 
for example, maintained by the Federal Government^ over 
the ports and seaboard of the Confederate States. If the 
substantial fact emerges from the war, that commercial 
traffic at sea can nowadays be kept over the widest areas 
under complete observation, all analogies drawn from the 
old blockades become misleading. 
To sum up my argument. Analysis shows that no case 
can be made out for neutrals having an inherent right to trade 
with belligerents, on the ground that private property at 
sea should be sacred. If neutral traffic may legitimately be 
