Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 130, vol. III, June 26, 1886

No. 130.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 1886.
For three-quarters of a century, England differed from the other great maritime states of Europe as to the way in which blockade should be defined. To begin with, it may be enough to explain that a territory is said to be blockaded when access to or egress from its seaports is prevented by the naval forces of another state. When a state, for purposes of its own, fiscal or hygienic, declares that certain of its own ports shall be closed against foreign vessels, that decree must be respected by other states to whose notice it is duly brought, provided that those ports are really under the control of the executive of that state. But that is not a blockade; it is a mere closure of ports, which any government, in virtue of its inherent sovereignty within the borders of its own territory, is quite entitled to announce. Blockade is essentially a war measure. When the President of the United States, in April 1861, proclaimed that a forcible blockade of the Southern States would be forthwith instituted, England and France immediately declared their neutrality, and although that meant that they recognised the Confederates as belligerents, and not as rebels, their action was unobjectionable, because, whenever the Northern States issued that proclamation, they by implication admitted that they were engaged in war, and not merely in the suppression of a rebellion. In recent times, however, recourse has been had to what has been termed ‘pacific blockade;’ thus, the coasts of Greece were blockaded in 1827 by the English, French, and Russian squadrons, although all three powers professed to be at peace with Turkey (under whose dominion Greece then was); and from 1845 to 1848, France and England prevented access to La Plata, although no war was declared. To admit such procedure as legitimate would simply mean that one state might put in force against another measures destructive of the trade of neutral countries, and yet expect those countries to view the whole operations as pacific. This objection might not apply to that pacific blockade which we have this year seen put in force against Greece, for we know that every vessel flying the flag of any other state than Greece has been unmolested. But the liberty allowed to other nations did nothing to mitigate the coercion applied to Greek trading-vessels, and had the object of the blockaders been merely to divert to their own merchantmen the carrying trade of the Archipelago, they could scarcely have devised a measure better fitted to attain that end. Lord Palmerston at least had a decided opinion as to how far such action was in accordance with law: his own words are: ‘The French and English blockade of the Plata has been from first to last illegal.’ In truth, pacific blockade is a contradiction in terms. In practice, it is enforced by the same methods as blockade between belligerents; and a recent Dutch writer has well pointed out that the sole reason why it has not yet met with the unanimous disapproval of European powers is that hitherto it has been levelled against only the weakest states.