Office of the Historian

File No. 8.32.61833/91.

The Secretary of State to the Ambassador of Brazil.

Department of State,
Washington, June 8, 1912.

Excellency: I have the honor to acknowledge your excellency’s communication of the 30th ultimo wherein you allude to a conversation with me last June regarding the question of an institution of an inquiry by the Department of Justice into matters of combination affecting the sale of coffee and of concern to the State of São Paulo in Brazil. Your excellency alludes to my having promised at the time to acquaint you with the results of the inquiry in question so soon as I should receive the necessary information from the Department of Justice.

Your excellency then proceeds with some narrative of the manifestations of the Embassy’s interest in this subject and enters to some extent upon a discussion based upon the course of the suit instituted by the Attorney General, finally intimating the hope that the subject be brought to the knowledge of the President.

As your excellency is aware, I was happy to comply with your wishes in this last respect.1 Our recent conversations seem to me to render it still more unnecessary at this time to enter upon any general discussion of certain points raised in the communication under acknowledgment, for, as your excellency knows, I am very sensible of the interests of Brazil in the matter and am using my best endeavors to make sure that the Government of Brazil shall have no just cause of concern in respect to the matter in question, it being the hearty wish of the Government of the United States that the interests of the two countries should be mutually treated with specially friendly consideration.

I must reiterate here, as I have said to your excellency, that while I have no recollection of the conversation of last June, nevertheless I have no doubt that I promised to give the Embassy the desired information so soon as I should receive it, the fact being, as I have already informed you, that the Department of State had no official information of the so-called coffee suit until after your excellency had gained such information directly from the Department immediately concerned.

I avail [etc.]

P. C. Knox.
  1. The President received the Ambassador on June 4.↩