November 13, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
THE AMERICAN NOTE. 
By A. H. POLLEN. 
In accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, which does not object to the publication as censored, and takes no 
responsibility for the correctness of the statements. 
WHEN all the great Powers of the world 
but one are involved in war, the lot of 
the solitary peace keeper may be com- 
. mercially profitable. But it cannot be 
either ethically or diplomatically easy. Nothing 
has yet so well exemplified the difficulties 
of President Wilson than the Note which Mr. Page, 
acting (as I have no doubt His Excellency was 
glad to be able to say) on instructions from the 
Secretary of State in' Washington, has just pre- 
sented to Sir Edward Grey. There are two things 
about the Note which are remarkable. Its matter 
— which broadly speaking, amounts to a sustained 
protest against every exercise of our sea power, 
except the driving of German merchantmen off the 
sea— and its manner, which is of a brusqueness 
that somehow seems unusual in diplomacy. Some 
of the experienced journalists who have treated 
the subject in the daily press, assure us that the 
general pohtical situation in the United States 
makes it necessary for the President to extend his 
protest over the widest possible field, and to 
express it in terms as harsh as possible. It must 
DC wide, to cover all legal claims for damage that 
Tiay some day be put forward ; it must be firm 
n tone, to square with the attitude taken in the 
Berhn disputes. They suggest in fact, that this 
.sweeping and peremptory protest must accordingly 
be discounted. No doubt in dealing with Great 
Britain, American Governments always allow 
themselves a latitude in speech that is not cus- 
tomary in other correspondence. And this latitude 
is generally interpreted as an evidence of an under- 
lying certainty that when the worst has been said, 
the worst is over. 
There is, on the other hand, abundant 
evidence that large numbers of American producers, 
packers, exporters and shipowners see magnificent 
opportunities of developing a trade, both directly 
with the countries now at war with us and in- 
directly with neutral nations contiguous to our 
enemies' frontiers, and they are furiously (and 
most naturally) angry that the officers of the British 
Navy are continually on the look out to thwart 
designs asserted to be — even if they cannot always 
be proved to be — perfectly innocent. It is to be 
remembered that, whether these cotton growers, 
metal speculators, provision merchants, and others 
are hyphenated or not, they are at any rate 
Americans. Their interests, therefore, are Ameri- 
can interests. If the Washington administration 
were actuated by the most hearty sympathy with 
the Allied cause ; if it believed that our enemies 
were also the enemies of every American moral 
and political ideal ; if it wished those ideals to 
triumph by the triumph of our arms, yet, if it 
did not feel that the American community were 
united in sharing this belief, it could not do other 
than speak up in defence of its nationals' rights 
and interests. That those rights were being 
asserted to the injury of our common ci\nlisation 
would make little difference. Unless the country 
were as a whole on the Allies' side, Washington 
would still make a feint of protest, even if it had 
no heart in the protest. 
But it would be well for us to remember that 
nothing since August, 1914, has happened to 
convince us either that America as a whole is on 
the Alhes' side, or that the Washington admini- 
stration has the slightest sympathy with one side 
more than with the other. Whatever the success 
or failure of Mr. Wilson's general administration 
may have been, his success in preserving an ofiicial 
neutrality has undoubtedly been complete. And 
this being the case, we have no reason for doubting 
that, in taking up the cause of those Americans 
who wish to make money out of our enemies, just 
as other Americans are making money out of us, 
Washington is acting in perfect sincerity. We 
must then look at the controversy on its merits, 
and not in the light of a political interpretation 
that may have no substance. 
AN INDICTMENT OF SEA POWER. 
The protest can be regarded as arising out of 
procedures alleged by the Americans to be both 
novel and illegal. Shortly, it asserts that the 
Order in Council of March nth, IQ15, created a 
quasi blockade of Germany, a condition the 
United States declines to recognise as lawful. If 
the blockade itself is a vicious proceeding, all the 
Prize Court proceedings arising out of it are vicious 
also, and the Courts themselves the puppets of an 
executive act which has no validity. Our embargo 
is not a proper blockade, because the Baltic ports 
of Germany are open to Scandinavian trade. Our 
claim to prevent the entry into neutral ports of 
goods destined for Germany, is unprecedented, 
and flatly and entirely illegal. Every act, there- 
fore, in our assertion of the right of search arising 
under either of these two heads, forthwith becomes 
indefensible. And even where our right of search 
is properly enforceable, we have asserted it in an 
illegal manner by compelling the neutral ship to 
come into a British port for examination, instead of 
this operation being carried out -as it used to be — 
at sea. Finally, as if this were not enough, we 
have introduced an unheard-of practice. We have 
actually looked elsewhere than at the ship's 
papers for finding grounds for suspicion and 
evidence of bad faith. It is all an intolerable 
violation of neutral rights. 
My readers would not thank me for ex- 
patiating on the technicalities of the position ; 
though the answer to most of them seems at once 
obvious and cogent. But changed conditions 
must be recognised. It is the spirit and not the 
letter that matters. The old law contemplated 
sea war as it was : we have to take it as it is. 
What is unprecedented is not necessarily un- 
principled. Let us then for the present pass on to 
the merits of the ease, leaving the legal points 
undiscussed — pausing only to repeat that prac- 
tically everything we have done to stop Gennany 
ha\ing the use of the sea either as a source of 
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