Mr. Olney to Mr. Smythe.
Washington, April 21, 1896.
Sir: I have received your No. 197, of the 9th instant, in regard to the expulsion of Mr. Loewi, a citizen of the United States, from Haiti.
Your insistence that the Government of Haiti in deporting Mr. Loewi should send him to a convenient port of the United States and pay his passage thither is approved.
The circumstances narrated by you under which Mr. Loewi was temporarily accommodated at your residence pending the sailing of a steamer bound for New York are appreciated and your course in so doing was excusable. It is assumed, however, that you took upon yourself no responsibility for his safe-keeping in the interval. It is not the function of the legation to act in any way for the local government in carrying out an arbitrary edict of banishment against a citizen of the United States. That is necessarily an act of force in the assertion of a claimed sovereign prerogative and is to be effected by the sovereign power. In this view of the principle involved it is regretted that you intervened so far as to receive from the Haitian Government the price of Mr. Loewi’s passage and to buy his ticket and put him on the steamer; unless in so doing you were careful to make it clear to the Haitian foreign minister that your only purpose was to assure yourself that he had in fact departed under actual duress applied by the Haitian authorities.
I am, etc.,