ABSTRACT
The British delegates at The Hague and London Conferences, including naval officers who were privy to our most secret war plans and were among the foremost advocates of economic pressure as the principal means of giving effect to our sea-power, found it possible to subscribe to so dubious an instrument as the Declaration of London. The process of whittling away our belligerent rights had begun at the Paris Conference after the Crimean War. That war had not been one in which economic pressure played, or could have played, a decisive part, and our statesmen did not fail to make concessions to neutral Powers in matters of economic warfare in order to secure their goodwill. The first of the crippling provisions of the Declaration of Paris was one which laid down that enemy goods, other than contraband in neutral bottoms, were exempt from capture.
