[285]. In addition to regular envoys, it is sometimes customary for a country to send an unofficial representative to conduct negotiations informally. During the years before the United States entered the war, Colonel Edward M. House, of Texas, was sent to Europe by President Wilson on at least two occasions in order that certain confidential discussions might be carried on without using the regular diplomatic channels. When unofficial representatives are sent in this way no public announcement is made.
[286]. Communications between diplomats and their own governments are not usually sent by mail if the matters dealt with are of great importance. They are sent by special couriers or messengers. When diplomatic communications are sent by telegraph or cable they are transmitted in cipher, that is, in a secret code of words which no outsider can read. Nations occasionally get hold of one another’s diplomatic codes and decipher communications which they are not supposed to read. For example, the German government in the spring of 1917, before the United States declared war, sent a wireless message to its official representative in Mexico, telling him in substance that if America entered the war, he was to stir up Mexico against the United States by promising that when the war was over Mexico would be rewarded with some American territory. This message was in secret code; but the American officials caught it from the air, deciphered it, and at the appropriate time put the German government in an embarrassing situation by publishing the message in plain English to the whole world.
[287]. When two countries go to war they at once withdraw their diplomatic representatives from one another’s capitals. The embassy or legation and its archives are put under the care of some neutral ambassador until the war is over. During the years 1914-1917 the American ambassador in Berlin and the American minister in Brussels looked after the interests of Great Britain at these two capitals. The work of Mr. Brand Whitlock at Brussels was notable, and the services which he rendered to the Belgian people during the years of their country’s captivity will long be remembered in that heroic little land.
[288]. In 1915, for example, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States, Dr. Dumba, endeavored to stir up trouble among certain Hungarian immigrants who were working in American munition factories, making weapons and military supplies for sale to Great Britain and France. When the United States government discovered these intrigues, Dr. Dumba was dismissed from the country.
[289]. The making of secret treaties continued, in fact, after the war began. By secret treaties France and Great Britain promised that Italy should have certain territories which were held by Austria and that Russia should have Constantinople. When the war was over the new government at Vienna permitted the publication of a whole volume of secret treaties that had been made during the preceding fifty years. The Bolsheviks in Russia also published all the secret treaties of the Czar that they could find.
In the covenant of the League of Nations it is provided that every treaty between nations which become members of the League must be registered and published.
[290]. There are some cases in which the approval of the House of Representatives is also needed before a treaty can go into effect. In the treaty which provided for the purchase of Alaska in 1867 and in the treaty which closed the war with Spain in 1898, provision was made for the payment of money by the United States. Now no money can be appropriated from the treasury without action on the part of the House, and if the House had declined to appropriate the money, the conditions of these treaties could not have been fulfilled. In both cases, however, the House did actually vote the necessary funds.
[291]. In 1870, for example, President Grant concluded with the government of San Domingo a treaty which provided for the annexation of that island to the United States. The Senate, after a hard fight, rejected the treaty altogether. Even more notable, of course, was the Senate’s action in declining to ratify the treaty which President Wilson signed at Paris in 1919.
[292]. The English government proposed that the United States and Great Britain should issue the declaration jointly, but President Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, thought it better that the United States should make the declaration alone.
[293]. At the Peace Conference in 1919 the European countries were willing to concede what was virtually a recognition of the Monroe Doctrine, and the covenant of the League of Nations contains a provision that nothing in that document shall affect the validity of “regional understandings, like the Monroe Doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace” (Article XXI).