"The scrap of paper on which Great Britain had promised fair play at sea
is torn up." By the "scrap of paper" Mr. Bullard means the Declaration
of London; and he knows perfectly well that the Declaration of London
was never passed into law, never accepted either by Great Britain or by
any other nation. It is simply untrue to say that we promised to observe
the Declaration, or that that document has in any way been violated,
since it never was law. Mr. Bullard himself gives most of the facts; so
it is apparently just for fun, or in the joy of rhetoric, that he
writes such nonsense as this.
The Declaration of London was an attempt to codify and improve the
traditional rules of warfare at sea, which have always been very
fluctuating and uncertain. It was due largely to Sir Edward Grey. He
summoned the chief maritime nations to a conference on the subject in
December, 1908; the conference sat for less than three months, and in
February, 1909, made a report which was embodied in the Declaration of
London. It was greatly discussed and eventually rejected in the British
Parliament. It was not, I believe, even proposed anywhere else. As a
matter of fact, the Declaration did not fully satisfy anyone. It was
certainly a move in the right direction, but there were two large
objections to it. First, many international lawyers--Professor Holland
was one of them--considered that it had been drawn too hastily and was
not a satisfactory legal code. Secondly, its desirability or
undesirability depended partly on certain large political problems which
were obscure in 1909. They are anything but obscure now.
To take one point only--the one that specially affected Great Britain.
We were then in the midst of our long negotiations with Germany for a
reduction of armaments and a cessation of naval rivalry. The Liberal
policy was, in general, to conciliate Germany by every possible
concession that could be made without fatally weakening ourselves or
betraying the rest of Europe. For example, we deliberately kept our army
very small, to prove that we intended no aggression. On the other hand,
we could not give up our naval superiority because we are an island
power; and, if we were once defeated at sea and blockaded, we could all
be starved to death or submission in a few weeks. The Germans, on the
other hand, objected to our naval superiority on a number of vague or
inadmissible grounds (e.g. that "the German eagle was lame of one wing
so long as her fleet was not as powerful among other fleets as her army
among other armies"), and on one that had some shadow of reason. They
objected to having their very large mercantile marine at the mercy of
Great Britain in case of war. Consequently it was worth our while, if we
could thereby avoid war and secure good relations with Germany, both to
abandon the right of prize and, in general, to cut down the rights of a
power commanding the seas in such matters as blockade and contraband.
(When I say "rights," I mean practices claimed as rights by ourselves
and others when in command of the sea during war, though often disputed
or denied by other powers, or by the same powers in a different
situation.)
That is, we, as the power commanding the seas, were arranging to give up
certain traditional advantages for the sake of getting a better code of
sea-law universally recognized, and in particular for the sake of
ensuring the good will of Germany. What happened? In the first place the
proposed code turned out to be unsatisfactory, and was not adopted by
any single nation. In the second place, instead of responding to our
overtures of good will, Germany sprang suddenly at the throat of Belgium
and France and drove us into war. And Mr. Bullard coolly assumes that we
ought to put in practice against ourselves, in war, the code which no
nation had adopted and which had been meant as a concession to avoid
war! And not only that. I can conceive a sort of visionary, like Edward
Carpenter, arguing that such an angelic example would have softened the
heart of all nations and made them hasten--I will not say to help us,
but at least to write us some most flattering obituary notices. But Mr.
Bullard takes quite another line. He thinks we are thieves and
scoundrels and tearers up of treaties, because we did not penalize
ourselves!
What we did was to announce at the beginning of the war, as a guide to
other nations, that, though we did not of course accept it as a code, we
should in general and with some deductions follow the lines of the
Declaration. This seems to Mr. Bullard worse than nothing: it seems to
me about the best thing that could be done in the circumstances.