From ‘How We Are Blockading Germany’, The Spectator, 20 March 1915:
We are, indeed, fighting against a thoroughly unscrupulous enemy, and we have to consider how we can bring the war to an end in the shortest possible time. If we shorten the war, we shall save life—the lives of the non-combatants at sea who are threatened by Germany’s diabolical engines—and shall redeliver to the world the seas free and open to traffic. We shall sustain Liberty against despotic dictation, and vindicate the sanctity of national pledges. Beside such objects temporary commercial inconveniences are really small matters. We cannot help feeling strongly that we shall make a great mistake if we try to argue solely on legal grounds. The issue transcends more legalism, just as a great Judge in a Law Court prefers plain justice between man and man to the pedantic insistence on legal technicalities. Abraham Lincoln would have ridiculed the suggestion that he should have stopped just short of the means which were essential to secure his great ends. So long as he behaved with perfect humanity he had no notion of being tripped up by a heap of precedents, most of which would be found to be substantially irrelevant on examination. That is the spirit in which we should behave now. Let any honest man choose between German methods and ours and say which he desires to have paramount in the world For it is nothing less than the assertion that the German will shall be supreme which is being contested. The difference between the German conscience and the British conscience is seen in the two naval policies. As Sir Edward Grey says in comparing these policies in a Memorandum to the American Ambassador:—
“The British Fleet has instituted a blockade, effectively controlling by a cruiser ‘cordon’ all passage to and from Germany by sea. The difference between the two policies ie, however, that, while our object is the same as that of Germany, we propose to attain it without sacrificing neutral ships or non-combatant lives or inflicting upon neutrals the damage that must be entailed when a vessel and its cargo are sunk without notice, examination, or trial. I must emphasise again that this measure is a natural and necessary consequence of the unprecedented methods, repugnant to all law and morality, which have been described above, which Germany began to adopt at the very outset of the war, and the effects of which have been constantly accumulating.”
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