861.00/1047a
The Acting Secretary of State to President Wilson
My Dear Mr. President: Mr. Lansing, who will probably be confined to the house for the rest of the week, sent me some memoranda from you in regard to matters in the Department. Among them was the enclosed telegram with your note attached34 on the subject of possible landing of Japanese in Vladivostok. You may recall that on Saturday, the nineteenth, I sent you the draft of a telegram on this subject to our Ambassador in Tokio, which you approved, and it was forwarded on Sunday, the twentieth.35 Will you be good enough to let me know whether this telegram which was sent, a copy of which is attached, will be sufficient for the moment, or whether [Page 352] you feel that further action is necessary? It seems that until we hear from Morris this might be enough.
In this connection, I should mention that a Mr. H. Fessenden Meserve, an American citizen, who is a representative of the National City Bank of New York in Moscow, asked for an interview with you and was referred to this Department. He called today and told me he had a personal message for you from the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, and I took the liberty of having him deliver the message to me in order to save your time. It is interesting as bearing on the question under discussion. He said, in the course of a long conversation, that the Japanese Minister asked him to see you and to say that he hoped that this Government would not send troops to Vladivostok or Harbin for the purpose of keeping order, as any such movement on our part would create a very unfavorable impression in Japan. He urged that the matter of keeping order and protecting life in Siberia should be left entirely with the Japanese. The Japanese Minister did not go into any details but rather intimated that if we did land troops the Japanese people would feel that we were doing work which properly belonged to them.
With assurances [etc.]