The affable and intelligent Mr. Archibald, alluded to in this chapter (p. 169), received on April 21, 1915, according to these disclosures, five thousand dollars from the Imperial German Embassy in Washington for "propaganda" services. If I had known this when he came to me in September, it is possible that I should have been less careful to spare his feelings.
III
The record of the German submarine warfare on merchant shipping is one of the most extraordinary chapters in history. Americans have read it with appropriate indignation, but not always with clear understanding of the precise issues involved. Let me try to make those issues plain, since the submarine campaign was one of the causes which forced this war upon the United States. (President's Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, paragraphs 2-10.)
In war all naval vessels, including of course submarines, have the right to attack and destroy, by any means in their power, any war-ship of the enemy. In regard to merchant-ships the case is different, according to international law. (See G. G. Wilson, International Law, paragraphs 1l4, 136, New York, 1901-1909.)
The war-vessel has the right of "visit and search" on all merchant-ships, enemy or neutral. It has also the right, in case the cargo of the merchant-ship appears to include more than a certain percentage of contraband, to capture it and take it into a port for adjudication as a prize. The war-vessel has also the right to sink a presumptive prize under conditions (such as distance, stress of weather, and so forth) which make it impossible to take it into port.
But here the right of the war-vessel stops. It has absolutely no right to sink the merchant-ship without warning and without making efficient provision for the safety of the passengers and crew. That is the common law of civilized nations. To break it is to put one's self beyond the pale.
Some Germanophile critics have faulted me for calling the Teutonic submarines "Potsdam pirates." A commissioned vessel, these critics say, which merely executes the orders of its government, cannot properly be called a pirate.
Why not? Take the definition of piracy given in the New Oxford Dictionary: "The crime of robbery or depredation on the sea by persons not holding a commission from an established civilized state."
There's the point! Is a nation which orders its servants to commit deeds forbidden by international law, a nation which commands its naval officers to commit deliberate, wanton, dastardly murder on the high seas (case of Belgian Prince, July 31, 1917, and others), is such a nation to be regarded as "an established civilized state"?
Were Algiers and Tunis and Tripoli "civilized states" when they sent out the Barbary pirates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? We thought not, and we sent our war-ships to whip the barbarism out of them.