Volume II Part 5 (1/2)
[Footnote 5: August 26th, Count Bernstorff gave a pledge to the United States Government, that, in future, German submarines would not attack liners without warning. This promise was almost immediately violated.]
[Footnote 6: Sir Lionel Sackville-West was British Minister to the United States from 1881 to 1888. In the latter year a letter was published which he had written to an American citizen of British origin, the gist of which was that the reelection of President Cleveland would be of advantage to British interests. For this gross interference in American domestic affairs, President Cleveland immediately handed Sir Lionel his pa.s.sports. The incident ended his diplomatic career.]
[Footnote 7: In this pa.s.sage the Amba.s.sador touches on one of the bitterest controversies of the war. In order completely to understand the issues involved and to obtain Lord Haldane's view, the reader should consult the very valuable book recently published by Lord Haldane: ”Before the War.” Chapter II tells the story of Lord Haldane's visit to the Kaiser, and succeeding chapters give the reasons why the creation of a huge British army in preparation for the war was not a simple matter.]
[Footnote 8: The italics are Page's.]
[Footnote 9: Viscount Bryce, author of ”The American Commonwealth” and British Amba.s.sador to the United States, 1907-1913.]
[Footnote 10: In a communication sent February 10, 1915, President Wilson warned the German Government that he would hold it to a ”strict accountability” for the loss of American lives by illegal submarine attack.]
[Footnote 11: A reference to the Anglo-French loan for $500,000,000, placed in the United States in the autumn of 1915.]
[Footnote 12: The Marquis Imperiali.]
[Footnote 13: Rustem Bey, the Turkish Amba.s.sador to the United States, was sent home early in the war, for publis.h.i.+ng indiscreet newspaper and magazine articles.]
CHAPTER XV
THE AMBa.s.sADOR AND THE LAWYERS
References in the foregoing letters show that Page was still having his troubles over the blockade. In the latter part of 1915, indeed, the negotiations with Sir Edward Grey on this subject had reached their second stage. The failure of Was.h.i.+ngton to force upon Great Britain an entirely new code of naval warfare--the Declaration of London--has already been described. This failure had left both the British Foreign Office and the American State Department in an unsatisfactory frame of mind. The Foreign Office regarded Was.h.i.+ngton with suspicion, for the American attempt to compel Great Britain to adopt a code of naval warfare which was exceedingly unfavourable to that country and exceedingly favourable to Germany, was susceptible of a sinister interpretation. The British rejection of these overtures, on the other hand, had evidently irritated the international lawyers at Was.h.i.+ngton.
Mr. Lansing now abandoned his efforts to revolutionize maritime warfare and confined himself to specific protests and complaints. His communications to the London Emba.s.sy dealt chiefly with particular s.h.i.+ps and cargoes. Yet his persistence in regarding all these problems from a strictly legalistic point of view Page regarded as indicating a restricted sense of statesmans.h.i.+p.
_To Edward M. House_
London, August 4, 1915.
MY DEAR HOUSE:
... The lawyer-way in which the Department goes on in its dealings with Great Britain is losing us the only great international friends.h.i.+p that we have any chance of keeping or that is worth having. Whatever real principle we have to uphold with Great Britain--that's all right. I refer only to the continuous series of nagging incidents--always criticism, criticism, criticism of small points--points that we have to yield at last, and never anything constructive. I'll ill.u.s.trate what I mean by a few incidents that I can recall from memory. If I looked up the record, I should find a very, very much larger list.
(1) We insisted and insisted and insisted, not once but half a dozen times, at the very beginning of the war, on England's adoption of the Declaration of London entire in spite of the fact that Parliament had distinctly declined to adopt it. Of course we had to give in--after we had produced a distinctly unfriendly atmosphere and much feeling.
(2) We denied the British right to put copper on the contraband list--much to their annoyance. Of course we had at last to acquiesce. They were within their rights.
(3) We protested against bringing s.h.i.+ps into port to examine them.
Of course we had to give in--after producing irritation.
(4) We made a great fuss about stopped telegrams. We have no case at all; but, even after acknowledging that we have no case, every Pouch continues to bring telegrams with the request that I ask an explanation why they were stopped. Such explanations are practically refused. I have 500 telegrams. Periodically I wire the state of the case and ask for more specific instructions. I never get an answer to these requests. But the Department continues to send the telegrams! We confessedly have no case here; and this method can produce nothing but irritation.
I could extend this list to 100 examples--of mere lawyer-like methods--mere useless technicalities and objections which it is obvious in the beginning cannot be maintained. A similar method is now going on about cotton. Now this is not the way Sir Edward Grey takes up business. It's not the way I've done business all my life, nor that you have, nor other frank men who mean what they say and do not say things they do not mean. The constant continuation of this method is throwing away the real regard and confidence of the British Government and of the British public--very fast, too.
I sometimes wish there were not a lawyer in the world. I heard the President say once that it took him twenty years to recover from his legal habit of mind. Well, his Administration is suffering from it to a degree that is pathetic and that will leave bad results for 100 years.
I suspect that in spite of all the fuss we have made we shall at last come to acknowledge the British blockade; for it is pretty nearly parallel to the United States blockade of the South during our Civil War. The only difference is--they can't make the blockade of the Baltic against the traffic from the Scandinavian neutral states effective. That's a good technical objection; but, since practically all the traffic between those States and Germany is in our products, much of the real force of it is lost.
If a protest is made against cotton being made contraband--it'll amount to nothing and give only irritation. It will only play into Hoke Smith[14]--German hands and accomplish nothing here. We make as much fuss about points which we have silently to yield later as about a real principle. Hence they all say that the State Department is merely captious, and they pay less and less attention to it and care less and less for American opinion--if only they can continue to get munitions. We are reducing English regard to this purely mercenary basis....
We are--under lawyers' quibbling--drifting apart very rapidly, to our complete isolation from the sympathy of the whole world.
Yours forever sincerely,
W.H.P.
Page refers in this letter to the ”blockade”; this was the term which the British Government itself used to describe its restrictive measures against German commerce, and it rapidly pa.s.sed into common speech. Yet the truth is that Great Britain never declared an actual blockade against Germany. A realization of this fact will clear up much that is obscure in the naval warfare of the next two years. At the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln laid an interdict on all the ports of the Confederacy; the s.h.i.+ps of all nations were forbidden entering or leaving them: any s.h.i.+p which attempted to evade this restriction, and was captured doing so, was confiscated, with its cargo. That was a blockade, as the term has always been understood. A blockade, it is well to keep in mind, is a procedure which aims at completely closing the blockaded country from all commercial intercourse with the world. A blockading navy, if the blockade is successful, or ”effective,”