No. 115.
Mr. Davis to Mr Read.
Sir: Your dispatch No. 56 is received.
The questions in regard to the receipt of fees, in currency or in specie, and to the daily deposit of them in a bank, are supposed to have been satisfactorily answered by the cable. Full copies of the telegrams are inclosed.
If the extra labor put upon you by the care of the North German consulates renders necessary an extra force, you will employ such as is necessary, keeping a separate memorandum account of all expenditures in that behalf for the use of this Department hereafter.
The items will also go into your usual and ordinary accounts. The Department relies on your prudence to keep these extraordinary expenses within reasonable bounds.
[Page 148]Your course in refusing to receive the property of French subjects for protection is approved. If the protection sought is against the act of France or of the French authorities, the rendering it would be an infringement of the last clause of the third article of the consular convention, concluded with France in 1853. If it is intended to be used against the North Germans, the granting it is a violation of the neutrality which we should observe in this war.
You intimate that citizens of the United States in Paris may apply to have their property lodged at the consulate for protection. As the receipt of such property may invole you in personal liability to the owners, unless you carefully guard yourself against it, the Department does not feel inclined to give you instructions which can be construed as requiring you to receive it.
Should you receive it, you will be careful to state officially in writing to each party that the Government will assume no risk in the custody of the property and no obligation to return it. A consulate is not established in a foreign country to be a storehouse of property in time of war. But if parties are willing to take upon themselves, so far as the Government is concerned, the entire risk of the safe-keeping and return of small articles which can be deposited in a consulate without interfering with the official business, the Department will be glad to see them accommodated, if it is an accommodation to them to be permitted to make deposit of such sort of property.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
John Meredith Read, Jr., United States Consul General, Paris.