So with the blacklist.

The only

formal answer to our protest has been the sending of a supplemental list containing thirteen additional American names. The discussion of our note has been through interviews which Lord Robert Cecil gives to American correspondents in London. Lord Robert seeks to make us ashamed of ourselves. If we are not properly ashamed but still vexed, the final official note can make some unimportant concession which the administration can compare with Lord Robert's big talk and claim a victory, Cecil feels us out.

The present official "statement" is so very reasonable. It says that coffee, rubber and jewelry have been found in our first-class mail bags for Scandinavia, supposed to contain only correspondence. Bags ostensibly containing innocent newspapers carry German propaganda. Therefore all our mail bags for neutral countries must be taken to London, opened and searched. "Innocent" correspondence is forwarded on with as little delay as possible.

But what is innocent? It seems that an American bid for a contract in Sweden is not innocent and is delayed until a British firm can get in and get the order. Read the instance that Mr. Lansing gave in his note to England last May:

Business opportunities are lost by failure to transmit promptly bids, specifications and contracts.

The Standard Underground Cable Company of Pittsburgh, for example, sent by mail a tender and specifications for certain proposed electrical works to be constructed in Christiania. After several weeks of waiting the papers have failed to arrivé. The American company was told that bids could no longer be held open and the contract awarded to a British competitor.

was

This situation is not an isolated one. American firms find their business over all the world censored by the British mail officials. Letters to Hong Kong never arrive. Traders with Russia report that they cannot get either their business cables or business letters through. Norwegian papers report whole strings of letters being picked up on the Norwegian coast, apparently dumped in the sea by the overworked censor.

What is the law? It is simple and clear. The whole world understood it. The law was that firstclass mail on the high seas was "inviolable," could not be opened. The principle was thus stated in a Hague

convention of 1907:

The postal correspondence of neutrals or belligerents, whatever its official or private character may be, found on the high seas on board a neutral or enemy ship, is inviolable. If the ship is detained, the correspondence is forwarded by the captor with the least possible delay.

In practice this provision of international law has always meant that first-class mail bags, even if found on captured enemy ships, were not to be opened, but immediately forwarded to destination. So it was in the Spanish-American and RussoJapanese wars. The Eitel Friedrich, when she interned here in 1915, delivered to our postal authorities, inviolate, the mail bags she had captured from enemy ships.

Great Britain began opening firstclass mail taken taken from neutral (Dutch) ships and claimed she found in them rubber en route from Brazil to Rotterdam, hence to Germany. Of course when The Hague convention was framed every one knew that little consignments of contraband might be moved in letter bags. But the amount of con

traband that could stand first-class postage is infinitesimal compared with the sacred rights of letter correspondence.

The British took first-class mail bags off neutral steamers plying between neutral countries and opened all the letters. For they claimed that even money orders or securities were contraband. The thinnest letter might contain a money order.

What did the United States do? Stand for the body of international law? We made a protest which, when examined, proves an admission of every British contention. Mr. Lansing said in May that our government

does not admit that belligerents may search other private sea-borne mails for any other purpose than to discover whether they contain articles of enemy ownership carried on belligerent vessels or articles of contraband transmitted under sealed covers as letter mail.

That is, Great Britain may search private sea-borne mails for these articles. It may also search for money orders and so open every let

ter:

The government of the United States is inclined to the opinion that the class of mail matter which includes stocks, bonds, coupons and similar securities is to be regarded as of the same nature as merchandise or other articles of property and subject to the same exercise of belligerent rights. Money orders, checks, drafts, notes and other negotiable instruments which may pass as the equivalent of money are, it is considered, also to be classed as merchandise.

Our only complaint was that the violated mails were not forwarded promptly after violation. The latest British statement explains that the expurgated remainder of our mails. is being forwarded as rapidly as is convenient.

Having admitted the new "right"

that Britain may open all our letters, what do we expect? Of course the information will be tabulated and sent to the British Board of

Trade. Of course the Standard Underground Cable Company and a hundred others will lose contracts to British competitors. Of course Russian trade will be hampered in all possible ways. One of the main aims of Great Britain is to hold on to her pre-war trade. What better means is there than the one we offer: the right to expurgate or control the correspondence on which our trade is based?

As in the case of the blockade and the blacklist, so with mails. I do not care to protect any American rights; let us abrogate them all. But in the name of truth let us not underhandedly abrogate what we loudly and hypocritically claim to protect.-August 16, 1916.

FAIR PLAY!

So much attention has been paid to the commercial aspect of this British expurgation of international mails that its human side is neglected. To be sure, our business houses suffer, but what of our citizens? Their losses cannot be measured in dollars and cents; they are rather registered in anguish of the mind and sickness of heart.

We have several millions of American citizens born in the central powers or descended from parents born there. Are these citizens to be without rights?

These citizens are bound by the closest ties of kinship and love to fathers, mothers, brothers, cousins on the other side of the ocean. The

central powers are engaged in a devastating war; perhaps the fathers and brothers are dead.

How can we find out? Not by letters, for Great Britain makes no promise, no pretense regarding the forwarding of mail to Germany. There are families here who have not heard for many months from relatives in Germany or Austria. Consider their distress.

Perhaps both father and brother are fallen and a stricken mother needs support. Can the son here, an American citizen, send her a money order issued by the United States postoffice? Oh, no, he cannot. The State department has accepted Great Britain's unheard-of contention that a money order is contraband of war. Therefore all letter mail may be opened, to look for these tainted slips. Money orders and letters may be thrown into the sea. The mother may go begging or to the poorhouse for all the protection that the American citizen's government will give to its own postal orders. She may die without one word from her son for all the protection his government will give to letter correspondence solemnly designated as "inviolable" by a Hague convention.

The rule seems to be that your rights are not according to your citizenship, but according to your descent. The British-blooded American citizen, by the threat of war, has upheld for him the last full measure of right to ship ammunition to the country of his birth. No one can object to that. It is the law. But the German-blooded citizen is not accorded even the poor right to correspond with the loved ones in the home of his childhood,

to soothe their and his anguish and bitterness of soul.

The time is coming when a judgment will be passed upon this administration by the American sense of fair play, decency, national honor. -August 18, 1916.

JACK

In New York is a chauffeur with a wife and baby in Hungary. He is an American, born in New York. His wife is a New York girl, educated in the public schools. Her parents live in a village on the Hungarian plain. When the war broke out she and the baby were visiting them. In spite of the dangers of travel, Jack wants them back in America, now that life is hard over there.

He cannot get money to them. Our government has admitted money orders to be contraband of war. He cannot communicate with them. In four months the British censor has let no word from her cross the ocean. Jack is a very wretched man. During the day it is not so bad, but at night he cannot sleep for the visions that come to him. He does not know whether they are alive or dead. He thinks, perhaps, it is not the Perhaps they will never write again. But her people cannot even send him word of that.

censor.

He feels bitter at the government that will not protect his messages to his wife and baby nor help him hear from them. He feels bitter at a government that will not allow him to help them. For, after all, are they not Americans, too, just like all of us? They are all he has in the whole world.-August 19,

1916.

"BY LEAVE OF ENGLAND"

By mining the British channel and leaving only a narrow strip open along the shore the British force all traffic along that highway of the sea into one narrow path which they control. But the path of safety has been made one of shame and humiliation. Within the three-mile limit over which a nation has jurisdiction the British treat the passengers and the crews of all vessels as if they were enemies or suspects on British soil. American citizens, men and women, bound to or from America on neutral or British ships are searched as if they were criminals. No one is above suspicion.

Of course, a vessel can go around by the Orkneys. But the trip is very much longer and the cost of the trip so much larger as to be prohibitive. So, in the narrow channel available for the world's traffic, British warships hold up the

shipping of the world, and seize, inspect or destroy mail communications between the United States and the Scandinavian countries, on the ground that it may be bound to or from Germany.

Now, there are millions of American citizens who are bound to Germany by origin, kinship or business interests having nothing whatever to do with the war. These American citizens cannot communicate with their civilian friends in Germany, except under the eye of the British censor, just as the friends of a prisoner cannot communicate with that prisoner except under the eye of a turnkey. Domestic affairs of American citizens, business secrets of American citizens, innocent missives of every sort belonging to American citizens, are equally subject to British official scrutiny.

To these millions of American citizens, in no way involved in the war or its outcome, is denied the "leave of England."