merchants and trading vessels employed in exchanging the products of different places, and thereby rendering the necessaries, conveniences, and comforts of human life more easy to be obtained and more general, shall be allowed to pass free and unmolested." Washington said of this treaty that it "marks a new era in negotiation; should its principles be considered hereafter as the basis of connection between nations, it will operate more fully to produce a general pacification than any measure hitherto attempted amongst mankind."

At the First Hague Conference, Ambassador Andrew D. White made a noble plea for the acceptance of this doctrine by the Conference. Many delegates were uninstructed how to vote on the measure and, after an impressive presentation of it by Dr. White, the subject was relegated to the second Conference. At this Conference, in 1907, Hon. Joseph H. Choate eloquently traced the efforts made from the time of our treaty with Great Britain in 1783 to have the private property of all citizens of the signatory powers, with the exception of contraband of war, exempt from capture or seizure. Such a proposition, it could at once be seen, ought to be a measure which would relieve England in time of war from all anxiety about her food supply from over seas. Germany supported the United States, and so did the majority of those voting, but, with Great Britain, France, and Russia in the negative, no agreement was

reached. Still the need of protecting her merchant marine is always goading England to enlarge her navy, and, so long as Germany's merchant marine advances with leaps and bounds, her navy will follow suit. It is safe to say that when England follows the advice of her late Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, who is a strong supporter of the doctrine of the immunity of private vessels in war time, and persuades France and Russia to follow suit, one half of England's huge navy, which is maintained chiefly to protect her commerce, will have no excuse for being, and the other nations may diminish theirs proportionately.

The fallacy, not uncommon, that an evil is likely to be ended more quickly if it is permitted for the present to do as much harm as possible, and that the relieving of merchants and consumers from loss in time of war would make them less solicitous to end war, has no justification in history. We do not lessen drunkenness, ignorance, nor crime by letting them run their course and teach their saddest lessons. Wars were far more frequent when they were more savage. When theft was punished by hanging, and clipping coins by shaving off the ears, these crimes were not thereby diminished. Permitting evils to grow makes men merely callous and bestial. Curtailing them in any degree makes men just so much more sensitive. We are shocked by a barbarity that is infrequent, not by one that is frequent.

What is to prevent the air and sea and every

weak spot on the globe from being neutralised as soon as the business men of the world come to realise that there is a genuine defence stronger than armour-plate or aeroplane destroyers, a defence of which most are to-day as oblivious as all once were of wireless telegraphy and the gyroscope?

In view of the enormous development of aviation and the eagerness of militarists to extend warfare into this new field, perhaps the most important application of the principle of neutralisation is to the realm of the air. The attempt at the First Hague Conference "to prohibit, for a term of five years, the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other new methods of a similar nature" did not receive the consent of Italy, Great Britain, or Japan. Yet Japan, though not bound by pledge, did not affront the moral sense of nations by using this method in the Russian war; neither did England in the Boer war,-as Italy, according to report, has done in Tripoli. In 1907, at the Second Hague Conference, no nation made any reservation in the prohibition of "attack or bombardment by whatever means of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended." This would exclude aerial attack there. To extend the hell of war to a new region just as the new substitutes for war are being adopted, with the certainty that the smallest nation with an "airy navy" may destroy the forts and dreadnoughts of the greatest and that all the civilised world must face a new horror with no increase of

safety, seems beyond the power of words fitly to characterise.

Another force which is also underestimated or ignored by Admiral Mahan and his school is the force of non-intercourse. China, which the Admiral speaks of as "at the mercy of the so-called Christian nations," was not only the inventor of gunpowder, but has been conspicuously the employer of a force which, when widely adopted by the western world, may prove more efficacious than the explosive which the nations so readily accepted and employed. Even a few unorganised Chinese merchants, unsupported by their government, were able, in a nation without a navy, to bring to some measure of justice our great nation with a navy second only to England's, when their boycott of our goods, a few years ago, wrought havoc in the cotton trade. Their recent boycott of Japanese goods quietly secured the desired and just concessions. What would not be the power of 400,000,000 organised Asiatics backed by their government if, twenty-five years from now, they should unite to refuse to deal with any nation that had wronged them and transfer their trade to a more friendly nation? The late Justice Brewer of the Supreme Court well said that

The Hague Court will never need an army nor navy behind it to enforce its decisions. If all the civilised nations would say to a recalcitrant government, "From this time forward, until you submit your dis

pute to arbitration, we will withdraw our diplomatic representatives, we will have no official communication with you, we will forbid our citizens having any business transactions with your citizens, we will forbid your citizens coming into our territory, we will make you a Robinson Crusoe on a desert island"—there is no nation, however mighty, that could endure such an isolation. The business interests of the nation would compel the government to recede from its position and no longer remain an outlaw on the face of the earth.

The mere threat of non-intercourse with any nation by an organised world would be quite adequate; it would never need to be carried into execution, any more than our army is ever called on to enforce decisions of our Supreme Court. It is the rational, bloodless, and effective weapon suited to an organised world which produces the largest results with the least waste and expense. It is par excellence the Christian method. It is the political application of the "shaking the dust off the feet" and "Let him be anathema. It is wholly removed from the spirit of violence and revenge, and must not be associated with the sudden, unannounced boycott which often does gross injustice in disputes between labour and capital. Non-intercourse should become a recognised penalty and be so pronounced in international law and treaties.

If even three friendly nations-the United States, Great Britain, and France-should begin