By the abolition of privateering, then, it would seem that the most disturbing part of the problem has been eliminated.  It is, of course, uncertain how far the Declaration of Paris will hold good in practice.  It is still open even to the parties to it to evade its restrictions to a greater or less extent by taking up and commissioning merchantmen as regular ships of war.  But it is unlikely that such methods will extend beyond the larger privately owned vessels.  Any attempt to revive in this way the old picaresque methods could only amount to a virtual repudiation of statutory international law, which would bring its own retribution.  Moreover, for home waters at least, the conditions which favoured this picaresque warfare no longer exist.  In the old wars the bulk of our trade came into the Thames, and thence the greater part of it was distributed in small coasting vessels.  It was against this coastwise traffic that the small, short-range privateers found their opportunity and their richest harvest.  But, now that so many other great centres of distribution have established themselves, and that the bulk of the distribution is done by internal lines of communication, the Channel is no longer the sole artery, and the old troublesome disturbance can be avoided without a vital dislocation of our commercial system.

The probability, then, is that in the future the whole problem will be found to be simplified, and that the work of commerce protection will lie much more within the scope of large strategical treatment than it ever did before, with the result that the change should be found to tell substantially in favour of defence and against attack.

The reduction of range of action is scarcely less important.  In the old days a cruising ship could be stored for six months, and so long as she could occasionally renew her fuel and water, she was free to range the sea outside the defended areas for the whole of the period with unimpaired vitality.  For such pelagic operations her movement was practically unrestricted.  She could run for two or three days from a superior enemy or chase for as long without loss of energy, and she could wait indefinitely at a likely spot, or change her ground, as danger or hope of plunder dictated.  So long as she had men left to man her prizes, her power of mischief was almost unlimited.  All this is now changed.  The capacity of each cruise of a ship to-day is very small.  She is confined to short dashes within a strategically defended area, or if she is bent on pelagic operations, is compelled to proceed so far to find undefended waters that her coal will scarcely permit of more than a few days’ actual cruising.  A couple of chases at high speed during that period may force her to return at once, subject only to the precarious possibility of renewing her coal from a prize.  She has, further, to face the fact that manning prizes must necessarily reduce her capacity for speed, which