612
ON NEUTRAL RIGHTS.
Nations better established than another, it is this, namely, that no belligerent can blockade the Coast or Port of another belligerent for the purpose of preventing the free ingress and egress of all neutral nations to and from such port or coast, unless that belligerent has a force stationed on the coast or near the port, amply sufficient to prevent the entrance and exit of neutral vessels—a force perfectly and constantly efficient—a force both continued in point of space and of time—so that the chain of blockading or watching ships shall at no part be broken, and at no time be withdrawn, and thus, no room shall be allowed in any way to escape the blockade, but care shall, every where and every moment, be taken to make it quite unsafe for any vessel to go in or come out of the port—to approach or leave the coast so blockaded. That undoubtedly is the law. But, perhaps I shall be told that our famous Orders in Council proceeded on a different principle—that they constituted merely a fictitious, or what is called a paper, blockade. The answer is, that the necessity of selfdefence against Bonaparte’s illegal blockade was the only justification ever alleged for those Orders, and that the principle of paper blockade never was asserted by us in any other way. France placed this country in a state of blockade by her Berlin and Milan Decrees ; and the Orders in Council which followed were always held by Sir William Scott to be merely retaliatory measures, and to be justifiable in no other light whatever. On the subject of blockade, I beg to cite the opinion of this most learned and experienced Judge in the year 1814, delivered in the case of the Rathbone, and to be found in the sixth volume of Sir Christopher Robinson’s Admiralty Reports,—long after all these questions had