Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Transmitted to Congress, With the Annual Message of the President, December 4, 1883

No. 193.
Mr. Sargent to Mr. Frelinghuysen.

[Extract.]

Legation of the United States,
Berlin, April 13, 1883. (Received May 2.)

No. 137.]

Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your instruction No. 99, of March 14. * * * I beg leave to submit a few considerations suggested to my mind by the instruction in question. * * *

The phrase used by me in my note of the 23d ultimo addressed to Count Hatzfeldt, pointed out by the Department, was not inadvertent. I carefully weighed every word of that note, and desired to present every reason that could influence the German chancellor to avert the yet suspended blow of prohibition. Please observe that any allusion to action by the American law making power was not suggested to depend upon acceptance of the President’s proposition, but upon the fact of prohibition, a measure replete with disaster to an enormous American agricultural and manufacturing interest. In the firm belief, then and now entertained, that phrase-making would not prevent or repeal such an unfriendly ordinance, and only the prospect of retaliatory legislations would, I distantly intimated that the United States, through its only law-making body, might possibly take notice of this prohibition. It certainly should be an element in the chancellor’s estimate of the question that a nation of over 50,000,000 people of resolute character and noble history might adopt some form of legislative reprisals. In the absence of instructions, and in the face of an emergency, I advanced this suggestion instead of leaving him to infer or overlook it. Before my note to Count Hatzfeldt was written, the American papers came containing some of my dispatches, in which had strenuously urged that the only way in which the German Government could be influenced was by the fear of reprisals by legislation. These were republished from the American in the German newspapers; those papers which were our friends in the controversy saying the considerations advanced should be heeded by this Government.* * * As these publications necessarily were authorized by the Department, I then saw no error in saying directly, but courteously, to this Government what it was thus informed that I had officially said of it.

* * * * * * *

I have, &c.,

A. A. SARGENT.