It is obvious that if the object and end of naval warfare is the control of communications it must carry with it the right to forbid, if we can, the passage of both public and private property upon the sea.  Now the only means we have of enforcing such control of commercial communications at sea is in the last resort the capture or destruction of sea-borne property.  Such capture or destruction is the penalty which we impose upon our enemy for attempting to use the communications of which he does not hold the control.  In the language of jurisprudence, it is the ultimate sanction of the interdict which we are seeking to enforce.  The current term “Commerce destruction” is not in fact a logical expression of the strategical idea.  To make the position clear we should say “Commerce prevention.”

The methods of this “Commerce prevention” have no more connection with the old and barbarous idea of plunder and reprisal than orderly requisitions ashore have with the old idea of plunder and ravaging.  No form of war indeed causes so little human suffering as the capture of property at sea.  It is more akin to process of law, such as distress for rent, or execution of judgment, or arrest of a ship, than to a military operation.  Once, it is true, it was not so.  In the days of privateers it was accompanied too often, and particularly in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, with lamentable cruelty and lawlessness, and the existence of such abuses was the real reason for the general agreement to the Declaration of Paris by which privateering was abolished.

But it was not the only reason.  The idea of privateering was a survival of a primitive and unscientific conception of war, which was governed mainly by a general notion of doing your enemy as much damage as possible and making reprisal for wrongs he had done you.  To the same class of ideas belonged the practice of plunder and ravaging ashore.  But neither of these methods of war was abolished for humanitarian reasons.  They disappeared indeed as a general practice before the world had begun to talk of humanity.  They were abolished because war became more scientific.  The right to plunder and ravage was not denied.  But plunder was found to demoralise your troops and unfit them for fighting, and ravaging proved to be a less powerful means of coercing your enemy than exploiting the occupied country by means of regular requisitions for the supply of your own army and the increase of its offensive range.  In short, the reform arose from a desire to husband your enemy’s resources for your own use instead of wantonly wasting them.