Great Britain's Sea Policy / A Reply to an American Critic, reprinted from 'The Atlantic Monthly'

by Gilbert Murray

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.

III.

But here Mr. Bullard has a very cunning point to make. It has been made also by Professor Liszt. He knows and admits that the Declaration was never ratified and had no legal force. But he points out that, both in inviting the other nations to the conference and in recommending the Declaration when it had been framed, authoritative persons explained that the purpose of the whole proceeding was "not to legislate but to codify." "We obtained recognition of the fact," says Lord Desart, "that, as a body, these rules do amount practically to a statement of what is the essence of the law of nations."

Consequently, argues Mr. Bullard, to repudiate the Declaration, even if it was never ratified, is to repudiate the essence of the law of nations.

A clever piece of trick argument. What is the answer to it?

(1) A very simple point. Mr. Bullard, following Professor Liszt, does not give the whole of Lord Desart's sentence, but stops in the middle of a phrase, where there is not even a comma! The whole phrase is, "amount practically to a statement of what is the essence of the law of nations properly applicable to the questions at issue under present-day conditions of international commerce and warfare." That is, (a) it is admitted that the existing rules do not cover the questions at issue under present-day conditions; and therefore (b) the Conference has done its best to apply the essence of the law of nations to the solution of these new questions. Lord Desart thought the attempt was successful, and that the Conference really had produced what was "practically" a statement of the essence of the old law as applied to the new problems. This view was not accepted by the British Parliament, nor apparently by any other, since they did not ratify the Declaration.