them. Any other course would be sheer piracy
and would inevitably lead to drastic reprisals. Now, before the captor
had destroyed many prizes in this fashion--especially if even one of
them happened to be a passenger steamer well filled with passengers--she
would find herself gravely embarrassed by the number of her prisoners,
and the need of providing for them even in the roughest fashion. A
captain having to fight his ship even with a few hundreds of prisoners
on board would be in no very enviable position.

The foregoing are the leading considerations which appear to me to
govern the problem of the attack and defence of maritime commerce in
modern conditions of naval warfare. I have discussed the question in
greater detail in a work entitled _Nelson and Other Naval Studies_, and
as I have seen no reason to abandon or substantially to modify the
conclusions there formulated, I reproduce them here for the sake of
completeness:--

1. All experience shows that commerce-destroying never has been, and
never can be, a primary object of naval war.

2. There is nothing in the changes which modern times have witnessed in
the methods and appliances of naval warfare to suggest that the
experience of former wars is no longer applicable.

3. Such experience as there is of modern war points to the same
conclusion and enforces it.

4. The case of the "Alabama," rightly understood, does not disallow this
conclusion but rather confirms it.

5. Though the volume of maritime commerce has vastly increased, the
number of units of naval force capable of assailing it has decreased in
far greater proportion.

6. Privateering is, and remains abolished, not merely by the fiat of
International Law, but by changes in the methods and appliances of
navigation and naval warfare which have rendered the privateer entirely
obsolete.

7. Maritime commerce is much less assailable than in former times,
because the introduction of steam has confined its course to definite
trade routes of extremely narrow width, and has almost denuded the sea
of commerce outside these limits.

8. The modern commerce destroyer is confined to a comparatively narrow
radius of action by the inexorable limits of her coal supply. If she
destroys her prizes she must forgo the prize money and find
accommodation for the crews and passengers of the ships destroyed. If
she sends them into port she must deplete her engine-room complement and
thereby gravely impair her own