Mr. Bayard to Baron Schaeffer.
Washington, June 15, 1885.
Baron: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note dated the 11th instant, which reached me at noon on the 12th.
It is deeply to be regretted that the friendly indentions and efforts of this Government to be represented at the court of Austria-Hungary by an envoy entirely acceptable to that friendly power have not been wholly successful in the case of the proposed minister, the honorable A. M. Keiley, who was commissioned by the President for that responsible and distinguished position on the 29th of April last, and of whose appointment you were advised by my note of the 4th of the following month.
It was solely and in direct response to the telegram of Count Kalnoky to you, which you kindly communicated to me on the 9th of May, that my notes of the 18th and 20th of May were written. The only objection assigned by Count Kalnoky to receive Mr. Keiley—being the religions faith of the latter’s wife—was answered by my note of May 18, and his suggestion or inquiry as to the practice of this Government to obtain in advance the “agrémnent” of a friendly foreign state before sending an envoy to it, called forth my note of the 20th.
The present declination of His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Government “to make” my “deductions the basis of a discussion” on these points closes, and, I may be permitted to say, somewhat abruptly, a correspondence invited expressly by Count Kalnoky’s telegram to you which, by his direction, you communicated to me; and I note, also, by your letter of the 11th instant that Count Kalnoky’s objections to the nomination in question “remain in full force.” As I have already communicated to you the views of this Government concerning those objections, repetition thereof is unnecessary.
The objection to Mr. Keiley’s reception as a minister of the United States at the Imperial and Royal court, which is for the first time made known and communicated to me in your note of the 11th instant, as founded upon a want of “political tact” on his part, which had led to the declination of “a friendly power to receive him,” I do not feel called upon to discuss, because it seems difficult to imagine the basis for such an objection to a gentleman who has as yet never been in Europe nor held official relations to any foreign state.
The “domestic relations” of Mr. Keiley, somewhat obscurely alluded to, are, I suppose, objectionable to His Majesty’s Government on the ground contained in Count Kalnoky’s telegram of May 8, namely, his being “wedded to a Jewess,” the effect of that having been stated by the same high source as rendering his residence at the court of Austria-Hungary “untenable and even impossible.”
[Page 57]Having stated in my note to yon of the 18th May the full recognition by the Government of the United States of the right of a foreign power to exercise its own high and honorable discretion as to the reception of an envoy from this Government, it does not seem necessary to repeat anything on that score, but I beg leave to draw your attention to the closing paragraph of your note of the 11th instant, stating the repeated wish of your Government that Mr. Keiley may not arrive in Vienna “just now,” and to inquire whether this expression is intended temporarily to delay Mr. Keiley’s presentation at Vienna, or is to be taken as constituting a final refusal to receive him at any time.
Accept, &c.,