In the succeeding months Southern statesmen in both Houses of Congress railed against the British seizure of their great staple, yet the fact was that cotton was all this time steadily advancing in price.
When Senator Hoke Smith made a long speech advocating an embargo on the shipment of munitions as a punishment to Great Britain for stopping American cotton on the way to Germany, the acute John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi, arose in the Senate and completely annihilated the Georgia politician by demonstrating how the Southern planters were growing rich out of the war.
That the so-called "blockade" situation was a tortuous one must be apparent from this attempt to set forth the salient facts.

The basic point was that there could be no blockade of Germany unless the neutral ports of contiguous countries were also blockaded, and Great Britain believed that she had found a precedent for doing this in the operations of the American Navy in the Civil War.

But it is obvious that the situation was one which would provide a great feast for the lawyers.
That Page sympathized with this British determination to keep foodstuffs out of Germany, his correspondence shows.

Day after day the "protests" from Washington rained upon his desk.

The history of our foreign relations for 1915 and 1916 is largely made up of an interminable correspondence dealing with seized cargoes, and the routine of the Embassy was an unending nightmare of "demands," "complaints," "precedents," "cases," "notes," "detentions" of Chicago meats, of Southern cotton, and the like.