singularly bad naval officer. That he sank the Kowshing and allowed the Chinese soldiers to drown without any attempt to save them was, as it turned out, merely a necessary sequence of the really illegal act of stopping the vessel at all. Both acts were dictated by expediency. With the best will in the world it would have been quite inexpedient for him to have bothered about the legal position of the Kowshing and her cargo of Chinese soldiers, and it is to be observed that the British Government allowed the Kowshing incident to slip, though there was no Japanese alliance in those days and little if any partiality for Japan. Togo's entirely illegal act was sanctioned as sound common-sense.
Questions of contraband are those which most nearly affect naval officers. In actual practice things work out to the effect that a belligerent by declaring an article contraband is able to seize neutrals carrying it to the enemy without risk of remonstrance from the neutral's government. When in 1904 Russia declared coal contraband, there is much reason to believe that she hoped thereby to solve some of her own coal problems. At a pinch it would have been possible to seize any neutral collier destined for a neutral port on the plea of 'contraband intended for Japanese use,' burn the coal, and pay compensation afterwards for the 'mistake.' No such incident appears to have occurred, but there were valuable possibilities in declaring coal contraband. Something akin to this actually happened
