unsettled and as questionable as it was before the Congress at Paris adopted the Declaration." This note, the second on the subject by Secretary Marcy, is quite long and will be found in Piggott's treatises, Moore's Digest, etc. Its arguments in favor of privateering and the immunity of private property and vessels of an enemy from capture, has, however, lost much of its force by the conditions of latter day maritime warfare.

It remained for the London Naval Conference in 1907-1908 in the first chapter of its Declaration to discuss and define the question of blockade in a proper and at the same time exhaustive manner. A strong and growing party in England, in view of the experience of the later wars and of the future possibilities of maritime war, advocates a withdrawal from a continued adherence to the Declaration of Paris. It has been urged that such a withdrawal is legitimate and proper at any time, as it is an agreement without the form or qualifications of a treaty, and that such a withdrawal may be feasible and desirable.

The conditions of modern warfare, as shown by the late World War, have extended the use of materials that are now classed as contraband, to such an extent, that the articles that are not directly or indirectly of contraband nature (articles that formed what was called the free list), make but a meager collection with an uncertain future. This robs the dictum of free ships, free goods, of much force, and to this is added the plainly recognized difficulty of examining merchant vessels in the open seas. This difficulty is plain, not only arising from stormy weather and high seas in the examination of small vessels with simple cargoes, but presents in the case of large vessels with their great and complex cargoes almost insurmountable difficulties, added to by the existence or growth of the parcel posts of mail vessels, when we consider what may arise from the exposure to both aërial and submarine warfare, the former of which is sure to develop in the future, and the continued existence of the latter in future warfare always a possibility until the arrival of the much-to-be-desired millennium when human passions and practices will pass away for the good of mankind.

It may be interesting now to follow the action of the United States. since the Marcy note written in answer to the proposal for adherence made by the European Powers signatory to the Declaration of Paris.

There was no general or concerted reply to the Marcy note or its proposed amendment to the Declaration. The French Government made no objection at the time to the proposed amendment. Russia favored it; Prussia, Italy, and the Netherlands were supposed to be friendly to it, while Great Britain was, it is understood, directly opposed to it.

Before any negotiations, however, as to the Marcy amendment had gotten under way, President Pierce, in whose administration Marcy was Secretary of State, was succeeded in 1857 by President Buchanan, who had been Minister to England during the negotiations between England and France on the subject, and who was to an extent familiar with the arrangements concerning the maritime warfare proposed to be conducted by France and England during the Crimean War. Mr. Buchanan after his accession directed the negotiations to be suspended until he could examine all of the questions involved. This suspension of the negotiations concerning the Declaration of Paris with the United States continued during the entire administration of Buchanan (see Moore's "Buchanan").

Upon his assumption of office, President Lincoln found the matter in this unsettled state. In agreement with the members of his Cabinet, Mr. Lincoln was desirous of placing the loyal States and his government in the most favorable and conciliatory light to European states and to their interests afloat during the war for the Union. Secretary Seward wrote to Mr. Dayton, then Minister to France:

The United States have never disclaimed the employment of letters of marque as a means of maritime war. The insurgents early announced their intention to commission privateers. We knew that friendly nations would be anxious for guarantees of safety from injury by that form of depredation upon the national commerce. We knew also that such nations would desire to be informed whether their flags should be regarded as protecting goods not contraband of war, of disloyal citizens found under them, and whether the goods, not contraband, of subjects of such nations would be safe from confiscation when found in vessels of disloyal citizens of the United States.

Seward did not regard the abandonment of privateering as a matter of importance to the United States, and the maritime history of our country since his time has proved that he was right. We could not secure any great matter by barter with his renunciation as a con

tribution of value, but he also, as Mr. Henry Adams says, "believed that the Union was vitally interested in precluding every excuse for interference in Europe."

It will be recalled that in 1856 England and France pledged themselves to enter into no arrangement with each other or any third Power, unless it started from the four articles of the Declaration as a whole and indivisible.

The offer of the United States to adhere to the Declaration of Paris naturally attracted the attention of the maritime European Powers. Lord John Russell, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, suggested to the Emperor Napoleon that both belligerents, North and South, should be invited "to act upon the principles laid down in the second and third articles of the Declaration of Paris of 1856, which relates to the security of neutral property on the high seas."

The French Government responded favorably to this proposition of the British Government, and Mr. Thouvenel, the French Foreign Minister, suggested that a friendly communication should be made to both governments in the same language, "that the Governments of Great Britain and France intended to abstain from all interferences, but that the commercial interests of the two countries demanded that they should be assured that the principles with respect to neutral property laid down by the Congress of Paris (of 1856) should be adhered to an assurance which the two governments did not doubt they should obtain, as the principles in question were in strict accordance with those that had been always advocated by the United States."

The diplomatic conversation that arose in this matter made a lasting impression on the mind of Mr. Charles Francis Adams, then Minister to Great Britain, to such an extent, says his son, Mr. Henry Adams, his private secretary, that it shook his mind, not only as to the friendliness of the British Government, but also as to the honesty or straightforwardness of its ministers with whom he dealt. "Palmerston and Russell were the chief agents in the affair, and their wishes to prevent the United States from acceding to the Declaration as a whole was,” Henry Adams says, "the cause of the whole difficulty in the negotiations on the subject." The mystery that neither Seward nor Adams could penetrate was the motive that actuated the British Cabinet.

The matter was complicated by the fact that Mr. Charles Francis Adams did not propose a single adherence to the Declaration of Paris.

which could not have been refused by the Powers concerned and could have been made by a formal note from the Executive Department of our Government. He wisely and I think necessarily asked for a convention, because the Senate of the United States should have some instrument to act upon and ratify in order to make the Declaration legal so far as the United States was concerned with it in municipal law.

Mr. Henry Adams deduced from the action of the British Government then existing, that they proposed in case of the permanent division of the United States, to revive their old claims, which were put aside by the Declaration of Paris, for belligerent rights as to enemy goods in neutral vessels, a right which Lord Palmerston had stated in the House of Commons on the night of March 18, 1862, had been abandoned because a persistence in 1854 would have added a war with the United States to the war they were then waging with Russia. Lord John Russell was also one of the objectors to the Declaration of Paris at the time of its adoption.

As 'the British Government had recognized the Southern States as a belligerent, Great Britain was not obliged to consider her privateers as pirates, unless the Confederate Government had accepted the Declaration of Paris as a whole, including the first proviso, and then had violated its requirements. Whatever attitude the United States assumed toward the Southern cruisers and privateers, was based upon other grounds than that of the mandates of the Declaration of Paris, and hence there was an intentional or unintentional misinterpretation of their motives, and France and England refused to accept an adherence that would be considered applicable to the existing war.

Lord Lyons, in a dispatch to the home government, said that he doubted whether the Senate of the United States would approve of a convention at that time abolishing the right of privateering by the United States.

The statement, made by English writers that the intention of the United States in proposing the adoption by them of the Declaration of Paris, which was met by the Anglo-French proposition to adhere only to the second and third rules of the Declaration, was for the purpose of preventing the recognition of the South as belligerents, falls to the ground chronologically, as they accepted the recognition by Great Britain of the Southern Confederacy as belligerents as a

fact before the conclusion of the negotiations. The two points of the Declaration presented were already a part of the policy of the United States and were not properly presented under the requirements of the protocol of the Congress of Paris, which required the four rules to be presented as an indivisible body.

Although Great Britain and France did not recognize the independence of the Southern Confederacy, they considered it desirable to obtain from it officially a recognition of the second and third articles of the Declaration. This was accomplished by an interview with Mr. Jefferson Davis, as President of the Confederate States, by Mr. Burch, British Consul at Charleston, accompanied by M. Bettigny, the French Consul. As a result of this interview, Consul Burch reported that "It was soon determined that Congress should be invited to issue a series of resolutions, by which the second, third and fourth articles of the Declaration of the Treaty of Paris should be accepted by the Confederate States." These resolutions were preceded by a first resolution which read as follows: "That we maintain the right of privateering as it has been long established by the prac tice and recognized by the Law of Nations." The other three articles followed in accordance with the terms of the Declaration of Paris. The resolutions were passed on the 13th of August, 1861, and approved by Mr. Davis on the same day.

It might be added here that the convention, formally proposed by Mr. Adams to Lord John Russell after the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as a belligerent Power, contained no reference to any action toward Confederate privateers. The preamble or declaration proposed by Lord John Russell, to which consideration was refused very properly by Secretary Seward as a matter of national selfrespect, read as follows:

In affixing his signature to the Convention of this Day between Her Majesty, the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and the United States of America, the Earl Russell declares, by order of Her Majesty, that Her Majesty does not intend thereby to undertake any engagement which shall have any bearing direct or indirect on the internal differences now prevailing in the United States.

In the Spanish-American War the United States followed the principles of the three last articles of the Declaration of Paris by official notification.