Neutrality, and declared she
would maintain them by _force of arms_.

This system of armed neutrality contained the following principles.

1. That commerce with the ports and roads of the enemy is free to
neutral powers.

2. That the ship covers the cargo.

3. That those merchandizes only be considered as contraband, which are
declared to be such by treaties with the belligerent powers, or with
one of them.

4. That no place shall be considered as blockaded, till it is
surrounded in such a manner by hostile ships that no person can enter
it without manifest danger.

5. That these principles shall serve as a basis for decisions
concerning the legality of prizes.

The principal powers of Europe, as Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Germany,
Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Naples, and also the United States,
acceded to the Russian principles of neutrality.

The Court of London answered this declaration by appealing to "the
principles generally acknowledged as the Law of Nations, being the
only law between powers where no treaties subsist;" and to

"the tenor of its different engagements with other powers,
where those engagements had altered the primitive law by
neutral stipulations, according to the will and convenience
of the contracting parties."

England, being thus opposed to all the maritime world, was at this
time obliged to smother her resentment; only simply expostulating with
Russia. But the want of the consent of a power of such decided
maritime superiority as that of Great Britain, was an insuperable
obstacle to the success of the Baltic Conventional Law of Neutrality;
and it was abandoned in 1793 by the naval powers of Europe, as not
sanctioned by the existing law of nations, in every case in which the
doctrines of that code did not rest upon positive compact.

During the protracted wars of the French Revolution, all the
belligerent powers began by discarding in practice, not only the
principles of the armed neutrality, but even the generally received
maxims of international law by which neutral commerce in time of war
had been previously regulated. France, on her part, revived the
severity of her ancient prize code; decreeing not only the capture and
condemnation of the goods of her enemies found on board neutral
vessels, but even of the vessels themselves laden with goods of
British growth, produce, and manufacture.

In 1801, principally in consequence of the doctrines of the Bri