Towards such a change in attitude the public opinion of the United States can largely contribute. While the majority of Americans side strongly with Britain and her allies, they make little distinction in their thought between a detested German militarism and a detested British navalism. Our traditional attitude is one of hostility to the pretensions of the mistress of the sea. "How many more instances do we need," writes Prof. J. W. Burgess, "to demonstrate to us that the system of Colonial Empire with the dominance of the seas, and the unlimited territorial expansion which it claims, is not compatible with the freedom and prosperity of the world? Can any American with half an eye fail to see that our greatest interest in the outcome of this war is that the seas shall become free and neutral, and that, shall they need policing, this shall become international; that the open door for trade and commerce shall take the place of colonial restrictions or preferences, or influences and shall, in times of peace, be the universal principle; that private property upon the high seas shall be inviolable; that trade between neutrals in time of war shall be entirely unrestricted, and that contraband of war shall have an international definition?"[[3]]
Even if England did not recognise her true national interest in a revision of the sea-law, we could not co-operate with her in any broad attempt to establish the conditions of peace in Europe without such a surrender on her part of rights which have become indefensible. It is not, of course, to be anticipated that a complete freedom of the sea will be immediately established, but unless the nations, not controlling the ocean, are given reasonable assurances of safety for their commerce and colonial development, each new war will merely lay the seeds of new wars.
To establish the freedom of the sea, five things are desirable:
(1) The abolition of the right of capture.
(2) The abolition of the commercial blockade. This would permit the blockading of a naval port or base, the exclusion or destruction of naval vessels, the searching of merchant vessels for absolute and conditional contraband, and the blockade of a city or port where the naval blockade was merely the completion of a land blockade, but it would give to all ordinary merchant vessels, either enemy or neutral, the same access to enemy ports that they enjoy in peace, without any further delay than is necessary for the prevention of non-neutral acts by merchantmen.
(3) The establishment of international prize courts and the submission of controversies to such courts.
(4) The internationalization of such straits as the Dardanelles, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Kiel Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar, as far as that can be achieved by international agreement.
(5) Establishment of an international naval convention and of an international body to enforce its decisions, to which international body all powers, naval and non-naval, should be admitted.
An Anglo-American agreement to enforce such a convention could be made the corner-stone of an international organisation, open to all nations. A naval force of neutral powers would enforce the freedom of the sea in the interest of England's enemies and in her own interest. With such an agreement in force much of the present naval rivalry would lose its meaning. If German commerce were safe in time of war, if she could not be blockaded and her ships captured, she would have a weaker interest in building against England. She might still desire a fleet to bombard enemy coasts or to invade England, but even without such a navy she would have a large measure of security. She might well prefer to forego some of her naval ambitions in order to secure British friendship. In any case even a naval disaster would not be so utterly crushing to England nor so great a hardship to Germany as under present conditions.