What naturally strikes the reader on perusal is this: why not the words, "I had said" and "I have asked" instead of "he would say" and "he would ask" which Sir Edward Grey used in his speech? Why wait eighteen months to arrive at such a decision? Why were not these words used as soon as war was declared? Flagrant breaches arose, as Sir Edward Grey should or must have known, and continued to increase in magnitude from the autumn of 1914. Why he waited until the then date, and why he had not acted before, was not explained. In the next few grandiloquent sentences he admitted the justification and the necessity; whilst the House cheered the words, forgetting past neglected deeds.
Next he admitted that "Germany had, in effect, treated food, when she found it, as absolute contraband since the first outbreak of war."
This admission gave one much to ponder over.
On the point of a stricter blockade Sir Edward Grey suggested that "if a rigorous blockade had been established the whole world would have been against us."
Such a contingency, put into legal parlance, is too ridiculously remote for further consideration. Why did he not explain why our Fleet was not allowed to limit particular imports to neutral countries to certain fixed totals per month, or per annum? It is unthinkable to suppose that any country would seriously threaten war in face of former well-known precedent and because such limits were imposed by a blockading Fleet. More particularly so if any such affected country happened to have been one of the parties to the Treaty of the Hague, which affirmed the integrity of poor innocent, unoffending Belgium; the country which, without justification or excuse, was violated, and ravished, outraged by the barbarian Hun invaders, and which so many other countries watched aghast without attempting to help England to protect or to avenge.
Admittedly it would have been easy for us to close the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Why did we not do so? We could then have regulated to each country not at war its full and fair average annual complement of necessities plus an extra and a generous margin for contingencies. The Government of each recipient country would have seen to it that its own respective countrymen reaped full benefits; leaks to the Central Powers would have automatically stopped.
What countries would such a course of action have forced into war against us?
Possibly Sweden, doubtfully Holland, remotely Denmark.
America had boasted she was "too proud to fight." She might have favoured us with a "note," but her love of trade would have been an absolute bar to the possibility of any cessation of supplies and munitions.