all say that the State Department is merely captious, and they pay less and less attention to it and care less and less for American opinion—­if only they can continue to get munitions.  We are reducing English regard to this purely mercenary basis....

     We are—­under lawyers’ quibbling—­drifting apart very rapidly, to
     our complete isolation from the sympathy of the whole world.

     Yours forever sincerely,

     W.H.P.

Page refers in this letter to the “blockade”; this was the term which the British Government itself used to describe its restrictive measures against German commerce, and it rapidly passed into common speech.  Yet the truth is that Great Britain never declared an actual blockade against Germany.  A realization of this fact will clear up much that is obscure in the naval warfare of the next two years.  At the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln laid an interdict on all the ports of the Confederacy; the ships of all nations were forbidden entering or leaving them:  any ship which attempted to evade this restriction, and was captured doing so, was confiscated, with its cargo.  That was a blockade, as the term has always been understood.  A blockade, it is well to keep in mind, is a procedure which aims at completely closing the blockaded country from all commercial intercourse with the world.  A blockading navy, if the blockade is successful, or “effective,” converts the whole country into a beleaguered fortress, just as an army, surrounding a single town, prevents goods and people from entering or leaving it.  Precisely as it is the purpose of a besieging army to starve a particular city or territory into submission, so it is the aim of a blockading fleet to enforce the same treatment on the nation as a whole.  It is also essential to keep in mind that the question of contraband has nothing to do with a blockade, for, under this drastic method of making warfare, everything is contraband.  Contraband is a term applied to cargoes, such as rifles, machine guns, and the like, which are needed in the prosecution of war.

That a belligerent nation has the right to intercept such munitions on the way to its enemy has been admitted for centuries.  Differences of opinion have raged only as to the extent to which this right could be carried—­the particular articles, that is, that constituted contraband, and the methods adopted in exercising it.  But the important point to be kept in mind is that where there is a blockade, there is no contraband list—­for everything automatically becomes contraband.  The seizure of contraband on the high seas is a war measure which is availed of only in cases in which the blockade has not been established.