One of the most striking surprises of a war so rich in surprises
as the Anglo-French-Turkish-Russian* was incontestably the declaration on maritime law agreed at Paris in the spring of 1856."
When the war against Russia began, England suspended her most
formidable weapons against Russia: confiscation of enemy-owned
goods on neutral ships and privateering. At the conclusion of the
war, England broke these weapons in pieces and sacrificed the
fragments on the altar of peace. Russia, the ostensibly vanquished
party, received a concession that, by a series of “armed neutralities”,'*? wars and diplomatic intrigues, she had tried in vain to
extort since Catherine II. England, the ostensible victor, renounced, on the other hand, the great means of attack and
defence that had grown up out of her sea power and that she had
maintained for a century and a half against a world in arms.

The humanitarian grounds that served as a pretext for the
Declaration of 1856 vanish before the most superficial examination. Privateering is no greater barbarism than the action of
volunteer corps or guerillas in land warfare. The privateers are
the guerillas of the sea. Confiscation of the private goods of a
belligerent nation also occurs in land warfare. Do military
requisitions, for example, hit only the cash-box of the enemy
government and not the property of private persons also? The
nature of land warfare safeguards enemy possessions that are on
neutral soil, therefore under the sovereignty of a neutral power.
The nature of sea warfare obliterates these barriers, since the sea,

as the common highway of the nations, cannot fall to the
sovereignty of any neutral power.

As a matter of fact, however, the Declaration of 1856 veils
under its philanthropic phrases a great inhumanity. In principle it
transforms war from a war of peoples into a war of governments.
It endows property with an inviolability that it denies to persons.
It emancipates trade from the terrors of war and thereby makes
the classes carrying on trade and industry callous to the terrors of
war. For the rest, it is self-understood that the humanitarian
pretexts of the Declaration of 1856 were only addressed to the
European gallery, just like the religious pretexts of the Holy
Alliance.

It is a well-known fact that Lord Clarendon, who signed away
Britain’s maritime rights at the Congress of Paris, acted, as he
subsequently confessed in the Upper House, without the foreknowledge or instructions of the Crown. His sole authority
consisted in a private letter from Palmerston. Up to the present
Palmerston has not dared to demand the sanction of the British
Parliament for the Declaration of Paris and its signature by
Clarendon. Apart from the debates on the contents of the
Declaration, there was fear of debates on the Constitutional
question whether, independently of Crown and Parliament, a
British minister might usurp the right to sweep away the old basis
of English sea power with a stroke of the pen. That this ministerial
coup d’état did not lead to stormy interpellations, but, rather, was
silently accepted as a fait accompli, Palmerston owed to the
influence of the Manchester school. It found to be in accordance
with the interests represented by it, and therefore also with
philanthropy, civilisation and progress, an innovation which would
allow English commerce to continue to pursue its business with the
enemy undisturbed on neutral ships, whilst sailors and soldiers
fought for the honour -of the nation. The Manchester men were
jubilant over the fact that by an unconstitutional coup de main the
minister had bound England to international concessions whose
attainment in the constitutional parliamentary way was wholly
improbable. Hence the present indignation of the Manchester
party in England over the disclosures of the Blue Book submitted
by Seward to the Congress in Washington!

As is known, the United States was the only great power that
refused to accede to the Paris Declaration of 1856. If they had
renounced privateering, then they would have to create a great
state navy. Any weakening of their means of war at sea
simultaneously threatened them with the dreadful prospect of

having to maintain a standing land army on the European scale.
Nevertheless, President Buchanan stated that he was ready to
accept the Declaration of Paris provided that the same inviolability
would be assured to all property, enemy or neutral, found on
ships, with the exception of contraband of war. His proposal was
rejected. From Seward’s Blue Book it now appears that Lincoln,
immediately after his assumption of office, offered England and
France the adhesion of the United States to the Declaration of
Paris, so far as it abolishes privateering, on condition that the
prohibition of privateering should be extended to the parts of the
United States in revolt, that is, the Southern Confederacy. The
answer that he received amounted in practice to recognition of the
belligerent rights of the Southern Confederacy.*

“Humanity, progress and civilisation” whispered to the Cabinets
of St. James’s and the Tuileries that the prohibition of privateering would extraordinarily reduce the chances of secession and
therefore of dissolution of the United States. The Confederacy
was therefore recognised in all haste as a belligerent party, in
order afterwards to reply to the Cabinet at Washington that
England and France could naturally not recognise the proposal of
one belligerent party as a binding law for the other belligerent
party. The same “noble uprightness” inspired all the diplomatic
negotiations of England and France with the Union government
since the outbreak of the Civil War, and had the San Jacinto not
held up the Trent in the Bahama Channel, any other incident
would have sufficed to provide a pretext for the conflict that Lord
Palmerston aimed at.