over the
maintenance of abstract principle.

The legitimacy of the blockade of May 16, 1806, was afterwards sharply
contested by the United States. There was no difference between the
two governments as to the general principle that a blockade, to be
lawful, must be supported by the presence of an adequate force, making
it dangerous for a vessel trying to enter or leave the port. "Great
Britain," wrote Madison, "has already in a formal communication
admitted the principle for which we contend." The difficulty turned on
a point of definition, as to what situation, and what size, of a
blockading division constituted adequacy. The United States
authorities based themselves resolutely on the position that the
blockaders must be close to the ports named for closure, and denied
that a coast-line in its entirety could thus be shut off from
commerce, without specifying the particular harbors before which ships
would be stationed. Intent, as neutrals naturally are, upon narrowing
belligerent rights, usually adverse to their own, they placed the
strictest construction on the words "port" and "force." This is
perhaps best shown by quoting the definition proposed by American
negotiators to the British Government over a year later,--July 24,
1807. "In order to determine what characterizes a blockade, that
denomination is given only to a _port_, where there is, by the
disposition of the Power which blockades it _with ships stationary_,
an evident danger in entering."[130] Madison, in 1801, discussing
vexations to Americans bound into the Mediterranean, by a Spanish
alleged blockade of Gibraltar, had anticipated and rejected the
British action of 1806. "Like blockades might be proclaimed by any
particular nation, enabled by its naval superiority to distribute its
ships at the mouth of that or any similar sea, _or across channels or
arms of the sea_, so as to make it dangerous for the commerce of other
nations to pass to its destination. These monstrous consequences
condemn the principle from which they flow."[131]

The blockade of May 16 offered a particularly apt illustration of the
point at issue. From the entrance of the English Channel to the
Straits of Dover, the whole of both shore-lines was belligerent. On
one side all was British; on the other all French. Evidently a line of
ships disposed from Ushant to the Lizard, the nearest point on the
English coast, would constitute a very real danger to a vessel seeking
to approach a