If, then, we are deprived of the right to use analogous means at sea, the object for which we fight battles almost ceases to exist.  Defeat the enemy’s fleets as we may, he will be but little the worse.  We shall have opened the way for invasion, but any of the great continental Powers can laugh at our attempts to invade single-handed.  If we cannot reap the harvest of our success by deadening his national activities at sea, the only legitimate means of pressure within our strength will be denied us.  Our fleet, if it would proceed with such secondary operations as are essential for forcing a peace, will be driven to such barbarous expedients as the bombardment of seaport towns and destructive raids upon the hostile coasts.

If the means of pressure which follow successful fighting were abolished both on land and sea there would be this argument in favour of the change, that it would mean perhaps for civilised States the entire cessation of war; for war would become so impotent, that no one would care to engage in it.  It would be an affair between regular armies and fleets, with which the people had little concern.  International quarrels would tend to take the form of the mediaeval private disputes which were settled by champions in trial by battle, an absurdity which led rapidly to the domination of purely legal procedure.  If international quarrels could go the same way, humanity would have advanced a long stride.  But the world is scarcely ripe for such a revolution.  Meanwhile to abolish the right of interference with the flow of private property at sea without abolishing the corresponding right ashore would only defeat the ends of humanitarians.  The great deterrent, the most powerful check on war, would be gone.  It is commerce and finance which now more than ever control or check the foreign policy of nations.  If commerce and finance stand to lose by war, their influence for a peaceful solution will be great; and so long as the right of private capture at sea exists, they stand to lose in every maritime war immediately and inevitably whatever the ultimate result may be.  Abolish the right, and this deterrent disappears; nay, they will even stand to win immediate gains owing to the sudden expansion of Government expenditure which the hostilities will entail, and the expansion of sea commerce which the needs of the armed forces will create.  Any such losses as maritime warfare under existing conditions must immediately inflict will be remote if interference with property is confined to the land.  They will never indeed be serious except in the case of complete defeat, and no one enters upon war expecting defeat.  It is in the hope of victory and gain that aggressive wars are born.  The fear of quick and certain loss is their surest preventive.  Humanity, then, will surely beware how in a too hasty pursuit of peaceful ideals it lets drop the best weapon it has for scotching the evil it has as yet no power to kill.

In what follows, therefore, it is intended to regard the right of private capture at sea as still subsisting.  Without it, indeed, naval warfare is almost inconceivable, and in any case no one has any experience of such a truncated method of war on which profitable study can be founded.