Eonomic aspects of the war

This story of international lawlessness in the first year of the Great War is the outgrowth of a public lecture given at New York University in March, 1915.

The book was written because it seemed to me that we Americans were paying too much attention to the affairs of belligerents and too little to our own.

After all, we are by no means untouched by the war. It imperils not only our present material interests but also neutral rights upon which the material interests of all peaceful nations in the future depend.

The neutral world is watching for us to realize and assert its rights and ours. Hence this statement of what those rights are and this record of what seems to have occurred to threaten them.

Before this war had been long in progress most of us learned for the first time the real nature of international law. The word "law" had tricked us into thinking of something clearly defined and accepted by those to whom it applied, and something backed by force to compel obedience.

Now we learn that what we considered international law consists mainly of a great body of precedents of different nations, some of them conflicting. These precedents represent certain immunities granted by belligerents to the commerce of neutrals in time of war. To be, sure, the immunities are an advance over the days when a belligerent proceeded like a pirate against lives and property on ships trading with the enemy. But the advance, when we consider it closely, is seen in no way to have kept pace with the growth of the vast interests it was designed to protect. International law at the best is an inadequate recognition of the rights of those who keep the peace at the hands of those who break it.