German diplomacy has seldom shown itself more audacious in its effrontery than in the persistent attempts it has made to place its controversy with the American Government on the same footing as that Government's discussion with ourselves. Its long and involved rigmarole in reply to President Wilson's quasi-ultimatum concluded with the suggestion that it would expect the discontinuance of submarine piracy to be followed by the abandonment under American pressure of our own alleged abuses of international law. This impudent suggestion is dealt with curtly by Mr. Wilson in his answer of May 8th. "The Government of the United States notifies the Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment entertain, much less discuss, the suggestion that respect by the German naval authorities for the rights of citizens of the United States upon the high seas should in any way, or in the slightest degree, be made contingent on the conduct of any other Government as affecting the rights of neutrals and non-combatants. The responsibility in such matters is single, not joint; absolute, not relative."

In these blunt words the President has finally disposed of the attempt to maintain that there is any parallel between the dispute over the sinking of merchantmen and the wholesale drowning of civilians on the high seas and our own argument with the State Department upon the manner in which we have exercised our belligerent rights. It has been the aim of the German Government and its Transatlantic agents and supporters to confuse these entirely distinct issues throughout, with the object of conveying to the neutrals generally, and particularly to the American public, that the enemy's

violations of international law are justified and provoked by our own. In the earlier period of the war, when a good many Americans were ignorant of its true character, as moulded in Germany, and were still, perhaps, under the old traditional suspicion of Britain as the tyrant of the seas, this procedure may have met with a certain amount of success. The President himself, in his anxiety to hold the balance even and to show that he was not desirous of being more indulgent to one of the belligerents than to another, may have done something to encourage this opinion by the somewhat superfluous asperity which he threw into his earlier communications with the British Government. But as time has gone on the facts have spoken for themselves. Much less shrewd people than the Americans could easily discern the difference between the proceedings of the German and the British Admiralties and the remonstrances which the State Department has thought it necessary to address to the respective Governments. In the one case the United States Government has to complain of such atrocious acts of illegality and barbarism that it is brought to the very verge of war in the effort to check them. In the other there is no more than a protest against the employment of our naval power, which could in no case bring about a breach of amicable relations, and must at the worst be settled by diplomatic means or by a reference to arbitration when the conflict is at an end. On this point Mr. Lansing issued the following statement after the dispatch of President Wilson's Note of May 8th to Germany:

While our differences with Great Britain cannot form the subject of

discussion with Germany, it should be stated that in our dealings with the British Government we are acting as we are unquestionably bound to act in view of our explicit treaty engagements with that Government.

We have treaty obligations as to the manner in which matters in dispute between the two Governments are to be handled. We offered to assume mutually similar obligations with Germany, but the offer was declined.

Asked by a German newspaper for an explanation of this remark, Mr. Gerard, the American Ambassador in Berlin, said that Mr. Lansing was no doubt referring to the Arbitration Treaty of 1914 between Great Britain and the United States, which provides that any difference of opinion not settled diplomatically must be referred to a special Commission of Inquiry instructed to submit a report to both Governments within a year.

some

The Anglo-American controversy, however, though it is not likely to lead to the calamitous consequences for which our enemies have schemed, would be unfortunate if it were to create misunderstanding between the two great peoples of the Englishspeaking world. At one time it seemed such untoward possible that result might ensue. In the opening months of the war there was a good deal of friction, and popular indignation in the United States against the atrocities perpetrated by Germany was mitigated by the feeling that England also was acting with harshness and with something of her traditional arrogance in her treatment of neutral trade. As time has gone on and the German crimes have become more ruthless and more flagrant this sentiment has softened. The British Foreign Office, though it has made some needless mistakes, has on the whole conducted the discussion with admirable temper and conspicuous argumentative skill, while the Washington

State Department has shown an increasing consciousness that at the outset it had taken up an untenable position. Its complaints have become milder instead of more urgent, and it has quietly dropped some of the large assumptions which it had put forward. The negotiators of the State Department and the able jurists by whom it is advised can hardly fail to recognize that Sir Edward Grey's main contentions are in fact in accordance with the principles which American jurists have accepted, and which any American Government in similar circumstances would undoubtedly enforce. The controversy has now been narrowed down mainly to questions of procedure; and even here the latest British Memorandum, in reply to the American Note of November 5th, 1915, makes out a case which it will be exceedingly difficult for the American Government to disprove.

Difficulties with neutral States, particularly with those that have an important external trade, are the invariable accompaniments of a maritime war. A belligerent has a duty to himself as well as a duty to the neutrals, and the two are not always easy to reconcile. His duty to himself is to inflict as much injury as he can upon the enemy with due regard to the dictates of humanity and the recognized tenets of the law of nations. His duty to the neutrals is to pursue that task with as little damage to their interests and trade as is consistent with his primary object. Some inconvenience and loss he cannot help inflicting, for the devastation and mischief caused by war cannot be limited to those immediately concerned, or even to those actively engaged in military and naval operations. A belligerent cannot refuse to protect himself or to inflict a blow upon his adversary even if by so doing he interferes with the trade and the free locomotion of the subjects of neutral Powers.

Germany began the war by raising that cry of the "Freedom of the Seas" which has always been popular in America and had been acquiring a certain vogue of recent years among ourselves. Thoughtful persons of the pacifist strain had been suggesting that the seas ought to be "free" in war as in peace, and that commerce ought to be allowed to pursue its beneficent and unimpeded way even while rival fleets were belching destruction at one another. Let the neutral merchant shape his course to the belligerent harbor under the very guns of the battleships, the searchlights of the cruisers. Why should you rob this harmless trader of his property at sea when you respect it -that is, when you are supposed to respect it on land? How much gentler, pleasanter, and more refined a war would be if it were left entirely to the fighting men on either side! A literary, professorial, and political campaign was set up in favor of the exemption of all private property from seizure at sea. International law was to be recast from this point of view. One can see the new method explained by Herr Hans Wehberg, Dr. Juris, whose Das Beuterecht in Land und Seekriege was translated into English in 1911, with a characteristic Introduction by Mr. J. M. Robertson, M.P., in which it is pointed out that the abolition of "booty-right" in naval warfare would be the most effectual means of bringing about the reduction of armaments and the reign of universal peace. "Plunder has been systematically abandoned in land warfare." So wrote Mr. Robertson in 1911. He has perhaps seen reason to modify his view on the subject since the invasion of Belgium and Poland. Probably he would not now agree with that eminent proGerman illusionist, Mr. Norman Angell, who (in the North American Review for May, 1915) was pleading for the "neutralization of the sea." At the

end of this war Mr. Norman Angel holds that "sea-law as it stands and as America has accepted it" will be changed: that "the inevitable outcome of the present contraband and blockade difficulties will be an irresistible movement in America for the neutralization of the high seas." A very convenient doctrine for Germany! No wonder Herr Dernburg favored it and made incessant play with the "Freedom of the Seas" in his clumsy Teutonic crusading in America. No British cruisers, it was insisted, ought to be permitted to interfere with the peaceful operations of American merchantmen engaged in transporting such innocuous "raw materials" as copper, cotton, rubber, and glycerine to the quays of Hamburg and Bremen!

Now such opinions, so far as they were honestly held, all proceeded on the assumption that the modern tendency was to confine war more and more to the professional fighting men and to leave the nations as a whole out of it altogether. A campaign was to be conducted within a sort of fenced-off and properly-policed prize ring within which the hostile armies could engage in their sanguinary athletics while all the rest of the world, including even the civilian subjects of the belligerent Governments, went on with their customary avocations, more or less undisturbed. War, perhaps, could not be abolished; but it might be robbed of some of its terrors for the nations at large by being confined so far as possible to the armed forces of the combatant States.

This amiable ideal was particularly cherished by some of those who took part in the Second Hague Conference. I spent several weeks closely watching the deliberations of this assembly, and was struck by two things. In the first place, it was not a Peace Conference, but a War Conference; nearly all the discussions turned not on methods for