Great Britain's Sea Policy by Gilbert Murray

"The scrap of paper on which Great Britain had promised fair play at sea is torn up." By the "scrap of paper" Mr. Bullard means the Declaration of London; and he knows perfectly well that the Declaration of London was never passed into law, never accepted either by Great Britain or by any other nation. It is simply untrue to say that we promised to observe the Declaration, or that that document has in any way been violated, since it never was law. Mr. Bullard himself gives most of the facts; so it is apparently just for fun, or in the joy of rhetoric, that he writes such nonsense as this.

The Declaration of London was an attempt to codify and improve the traditional rules of warfare at sea, which have always been very fluctuating and uncertain. It was due largely to Sir Edward Grey. He summoned the chief maritime nations to a conference on the subject in December, 1908; the conference sat for less than three months, and in February, 1909, made a report which was embodied in the Declaration of London. It was greatly discussed and eventually rejected in the British Parliament. It was not, I believe, even proposed anywhere else. As a matter of fact, the Declaration did not fully satisfy anyone. It was certainly a move in the right direction, but there were two large objections to it. First, many international lawyers -- Professor Holland was one of them -- considered that it had been drawn too hastily and was not a satisfactory legal code. Secondly, its desirability or undesirability depended partly on certain large political problems which were obscure in 1909. They are anything but obscure now.