NOTHING SETTLED

With the Allied Powers the American Government's relations continued to be friendly under certain diplomatic difficulties, due to a group of unadjusted issues relating to the blockade of German ports, mail seizures, and the blacklist. Popularly, overwhelming pro-Ally sympathies and an enormous trade due directly to the war more than offset commercial irritation arising from Allied infractions of American rights; but while they continued they intruded as obstacles to the preservation of official amity. If the Administration was content to enter its protests and then let matters rest, its inaction merely meant that the Allies' sins were magnanimously tolerated, not condoned. The Allies, on the other hand, maintained that they were not sinning at all, that they were only doing what the United States itself had done when engaged in war and would do again if it ever became a belligerent. Diplomacy failed to reconcile the differences, and so nothing was settled.

Great Britain, as the chief offender in trampling roughshod over American privileges of trade in war time, added to her manifold transgressions, in August, 1916, by placing further curbs on neutral trade with the Netherland Overseas Trust. Under a scheme to ration the neutral countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland—that is, restricting their imports to their estimated domestic needs—further licenses granted to British exporters to trade with these countries were discontinued. Here was a check on British exports for fear of the surplus reaching Germany through neutral channels. A check on American exports followed by Great Britain forbidding the Overseas Trust to accept further consignments of certain commodities from the United States for Holland, and by her refusal to grant letters of assurance safeguarding the delivery of American shipments destined for the three other countries. By these devices Great Britain controlled supplies to these countries at the source. The effect was that certain American consignments predestined for Holland were stopped altogether, while the shipping companies trading between the United States and Scandinavia could not take cargoes without British assurances of safe discharge at their ports of destination. The British official view was that excessive exports from Great Britain to these countries could not very well be forbidden while permitting them from the United States and other neutral sources. The veto had to be general to be effective.

One measure passed by Congress, providing for the creation of a Shipping Board, empowered the Secretary of the Treasury to forbid clearance to any vessel whose owner or agents refused to accept consignments offered for transport abroad by an American citizen for reasons other than lack of space or inadaptability of the vessel to carry the cargo offered. Another measure, the Omnibus Revenue Law, made similar provisions in a more drastic form, aiming specifically at retaliation for the Allies' blacklist of German-American firms, and the various blockades and embargoes in operation against American products. It provided that the owners or agents of vessels affiliated with a belligerent engaged in a war to which the United States was not a party must neither discriminate in favor of nor against any citizen, product, or locality of the United States in accepting or refusing consignments on pain of clearance being refused.

The same penalty attached to vessels of any belligerent which denied to American ships and citizens the same privileges of commerce which the offending belligerent accorded to its own vessels or to those of any other nationality. An alternative penalty, to be exercised by the President in his discretion, denied to such offending belligerents' ships and citizens the privileges of commerce with the United States until reciprocal liberty of trade was restored. A third provision aimed at penalizing a belligerent who prohibited the importation at its ports of any American product, not injurious to health or morals, by barring importation into the United States from the offending country similar or other articles. The prevailing view was that the exercise of such reprisals by the President would virtually mean nonintercourse in trade and involve serious international complications. An isolated English impression, only of moment because it placed the aspects of the legislation in a nutshell, recognized that while it might be merely a "flourish" having a special virtue on the eve of a presidential election, the reprisals were aimed at the Allies, primarily against Great Britain, and were popular in the United States as a commercial club that could be wielded instead of having recourse to the threats that brought Germany to respect American demands. But the British official attitude as taken by Lord Robert Cecil was unmoved. "It is not likely," he said, "that Great Britain will change her blacklist policy at the request of the United States. The idea that Great Britain is adopting a deliberate policy with which to injure American trade is the purest moonshine, since outside of our own dominions our trade with the United States is the most important. Of course, natural trade rivalry exists, but no responsible statesman in this country would dream of proposing an insane measure designed to injure American commerce."

The blacklist was the last straw which provoked the retaliatory legislation. But, alone of the seemingly unadjustable disputes pending between the United States and Great Britain, it was on the blacklist issue that the latter had an unanswerable defense. The British stand left official Washington's complaint bereft of foundation under international law. The only ground on which the American protest could be justified was by contending that the blacklist violated international comity. In other words, if it was not illegal—there was no doubt of its legality—it was an incivility.

There had been the usual diplomatic exchange between the two governments on the subject prefacing a lengthy communication sent by Lord Grey—the new title of the British Foreign Secretary upon his promotion to the peerage—on October 10, 1916. Therein he repeated that the blacklist was promulgated in pursuance of the Trading with the Enemy Act (a war measure explained in a previous volume), and was a piece of purely municipal legislation. Moreover, the American Government was assured, "the Government of Great Britain neither purport nor claim to impose any disabilities or penalties upon neutral individuals or upon neutral commerce. The measure is simply one which enjoins those who owe allegiance to Great Britain to cease having trade relations with persons who are found to be assisting or rendering service to the enemy."

Nor were the steps taken confined to the United States:

"With the full consent of the Allied Governments, firms even in Allied countries are being placed on the statutory list, if they are firms with whom it is necessary to prevent British subjects from trading. These considerations may, perhaps, serve to convince the Government of the United States that the measures now being taken are not directed against neutral trade in general. Still less are they directed against American trade in particular; they are part of the general belligerent operations designed to weaken the enemy's resources."

The burden of the note was that Great Britain maintained the right, which in the existing crisis she also deemed a duty, to withhold British facilities from those who conducted their trade for the benefit of her foes. This right Lord Grey characterized as so obvious that he could not believe the United States Government seriously contested the inherent privilege of a sovereign state to exercise it except under a misconception of the scope and intent of the measures taken. It would appear that the American Government gracefully surrendered, by default, its earlier contention that Great Britain had no right to forbid her subjects from trading with American firms having Teutonic affiliations.

The American objections to detentions and censorship of mails by the Allied Powers, which were bent on preventing German sympathizers from using the postal service to neutral countries as a channel for transmitting money, correspondence, and goods for the Central Powers, brought a further communication from Lord Grey on October 12, 1916. It threw no new light on the subject, the bearings of which were dealt with in a previous volume. The American contentions, so far from being conceded, were themselves attacked in an argument intended to refute them. The Allied governments were only prepared to give assurances that they would continue to lessen the annoyances caused by the practice and were "ready to settle responsibility therefor in accordance with the principles of law and justice, which it never was and is not now their intention to evade."

Lord Grey thus defined the Allied position:

"The practice of the Germans to make improper use of neutral mails and forward hostile correspondence, even official communications, dealing with hostilities, under cover of apparently unoffensive envelopes, mailed by neutrals to neutrals, made it necessary to examine mails from or to countries neighboring Germany under the same conditions as mails from or to Germany itself; but as a matter of course mails from neutrals to neutrals that do not cover such improper uses have nothing to fear."

Germany's treatment of mails, Lord Grey pointed out, went much further than mere interception:

"As regards the proceedings of the German Empire toward postal correspondence during the present war, the Allied governments have informed the Government of the United States of the names of some of the mail steamers whose mail bags have been not examined, to be sure, but purely and simply destroyed at sea by the German naval authorities. Other names could very easily be added. The very recent case of the mail steamer Hudikswall (Swedish), carrying 670 mail bags, may be cited."

The discussion was as profitless as that arising from the blacklist. As to the blockade issue, involving interference with American commerce on the high seas, both sides appeared to epistolarily bolt, and the question remained in suspended animation. The blacklist and mail disputes acquired a similar status.[Back to Contents]