Thomas Erskine Holland: “Only compare the horrors of the Thirty Years' War with the struggles of modern times.”

It is surely notorious that the delegates of a Power, by agreeing to the draft of a treaty, give to it no international validity, which results only when the treaty has been ratified by their Government.

Ought they not to be referred to a Royal Commission, on which should be placed representatives of the Navy and Merchant Service, of the corn trade, and of the Colonies, together with international lawyers, in touch with the views of their…

The Declaration of London has, most fortunately, never been ratified by the Government of Great Britain.

Already in the first weeks of the war England had renounced the Declaration of London, the contents of which her own delegates had recognised as binding in international law.