File No. 881.111/2
The American Chargé d’Affaires to the Secretary of State.
Tangier , June 30, 1913 .
Sir: I have the honor to inform the Department that according to its cabled instructions dated March 26, 1913, after personally assuring myself that the same would be acceptable to the majority of my colleagues, I officially communicated to the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps the modification suggested therein by the Department to the text of the letter which it was proposed to address to the Sultan’s representative at Tangier, Sid Mohamed Ben Mohamed El Guebbass, in answer to his letter concerning the insecurity of foreigners traveling in certain parts of Morocco. The draft of this proposed reply was transmitted to the Department in my No. 370 of March 4, 1913.
The modification proposed by the Department was adopted by the representatives of the following Powers: Holland, Belgium, Italy, Great Britain, Portugal and Germany; and the amended passage in the second paragraph of the letter now reads:—
* * * the Diplomatic Body reserves to its respective Governments, etc.
instead of:—
* * * the Diplomatic Body reserves to itself, etc.
The letter thus amended was transmitted to the Sultan’s representative here by the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps under date of April 30th last.
In view of the ambiguous nature of the annotation of the Representatives of France and Spain, the Powers principally interested, on the question of the amendment, their observations on the Decanat circular submitting my proposed modification being limited to a simple “Vu” (Seen), the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps invited the various Legations to send their respective interpreters to collaborate in the translation into Arabic of the amended answer to the Sultan’s representative; and the compliance on the part of the French and Spanish Legations with this request together with the fact of the actual collaboration of their interpreters cannot but be construed as an acceptance on their part of the terms of the reply as it was amended in accordance with the proposal of the Department.
In view of the possible importance of this question, I have deemed it advisable to place these facts before the Department in order that they may become a matter of record.
I have [etc.]