No. 278.
Mr. Evarts
to Mr. White.
Washington, May 25, 1880.
Sir: I have given some consideration to the questions presented in your dispatch No. 114, concerning the hardships which you so earnestly represent as involved in charging passport fees upon American students in straitened circumstances abroad. I cannot but admire, with some little admixture of surprise, the enterprise shown by the large number of students of both sexes, amounting, as you show, in Germany alone, to many hundreds, who gladly meet the burden of a long and often to them expensive journey, to live for years in a foreign land on the slender resources they may be able to draw from their humble American homes, far removed from kindred of speech and blood, and subject to privations and hardships affecting not only themselves, but also their families in not infrequent cases, in pursuit of the educational advantages which the foreign seats of learning are deemed to offer over the many American institutions which freely open their doors to the home student in like circumstances of life and purse.
Unfortunately, however, what relief I would otherwise feel disposed to recommend in the sense you suggest would not, in my judgment, be compatible with that freedom from liability to abuse which the interests of our domestic administration seem to demand. To establish class distinctions in the issue of passports would be an innovation, opening the way to the consideration of other claims to favor, of equal or even greater justice. It is to the interest of our system to have passports procured here by travelers before proceeding abroad, as a check upon the doubtful applications too often presented to our legations. The modifications you propose would soon relieve the Department from nearly all applications of the class in question and increase correspondingly the number of applications at legations; and unless such rigid measures for the prevention of abuse in the issue of free passports thereat were adopted as would entail additional burdens upon our legations and vexations [Page 434] upon the applicants, the estimate of 100 passports you made on the sixth page of your dispatch would probably be materially affected.
I regret, with you, the hardship which may be entailed by the exaction of a passport fee in the few really meritorious cases which doubtless arise from time to time, but I am disposed, nevertheless, to consider this hardship as but a concomitant of the other and greater hardships entailed by the pursuit of knowledge at so great a distance from home.
I am, &c.,