Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [185]
Naval warfare was the subject of the fiercest struggle, with the right of capture of seaborne commerce as the central issue. As the basic weapon of blockade, Britain was determined to preserve the right of capture free of any restrictions. Germany was equally determined to restrict it by international prize court and other interferences. The use of submarines and underwater contact mines as weapons against blockade Germany was determined to defend and Britain to restrict. On the immunity of private property, Grey, at least, had learned Mahan’s lesson if the American delegation had not. He instructed his delegates that Britain could not assent to a principle which “if carried to its logical conclusion would entail the abolition of commercial blockade.” He added a reason, in his tortured way, which would certainly not have occurred to Mahan. Britain could not agree to anything, he wrote, which might “so limit the prospective liability of war as to remove some of the considerations which now restrain the public from contemplating it.” Translated into simpler language, this meant that Britain could not agree to anything which might, by limiting the damages of war, cause people to enter on it more lightly. With the British Liberals it was obligatory to find a moral reason to fortify a natural policy of self-interest, a practice no one carried to higher perfection or more obscure expression than Sir Edward Grey.
Eight conventions on naval warfare were ultimately reached establishing rules, rights and restrictions for every possible means of injuring the enemy. It took thirteen articles to prohibit the use of underwater contact mines unless harmless one hour after being laid; another thirteen articles to regulate naval bombardment of shore establishments; fifty-seven articles to govern an international prize court. Other conventions dealt with the right of capture, the nature of contraband, the rights and duties of neutrals at sea but so unsatisfactorily that all these questions were resumed at a conference of naval powers in London in the following year.
On arbitration, the motive power, now that Pauncefote was gone, was chiefly American, with Secretary Root, a lawyer by profession, supplying the energy behind Choate. Root’s object was to transform the tribunal established in 1899 from an optional court for litigants who agreed to arbitration into a Permanent Court of International Justice with permanent judges deciding issues of international law by “judicial methods under a sense of judicial responsibility.” President Roosevelt supported the aim without strong conviction, confessing to Root midway through the Conference that “I have not followed things at The Hague.” To his friend Speck von Sternberg, the German Ambassador, he expressed himself more forcibly as, for some reason, he habitually did to Germans. He could not take a proper interest in the Hague proceedings, he told Speck, because he was so “utterly disgusted” with the nonsense chattered by professional peace advocates.
The American proposal for a Permanent Court ran into strong opposition, one obstacle being Brazil’s insistence that all forty-four nations be represented on it. The idea of having decisions made for them “by decayed Oriental states like Turkey or Persia … or a half-breed lawyer from Central or South America,