File No. 763.72/353
The French Chargé d’Affaires ( Clausse ) to the Secretary of State
Manchester, Massachusetts , August 12, 1914.
[Received 5:30 p.m.]
[Telegram]
I am informed that the Federal Government is contemplating steps to suppress the supposed differential treatment now accorded by the United States Government to wireless communications and cable messages. If my information be correct, I beg your excellency to consider the radically different nature of these two sorts of communication. What my Government objected to from the start was the direct communication with the German men-of-war by which they would have been warned of the movements of the French merchantmen and men-of-war and which constituted a violation of neutrality. It is only because of the impossibility to ascertain whether messages addressed to Germany would not reach German men-of-war that my Government protested against the indiscriminate use of the Tuckerton and Sayville wireless stations. All belligerents are in that respect on an equal footing and this Embassy is unable to let French men-of-war know of the movements of hostile vessels. The situation is different with cable communications, as a message forwarded that way can only reach a well-defined point. It cannot be sent to any man-of-war, thus making the United States directly [Page 672] participant to a non-neutral act. The discrimination against Germany now supposed to exist in the United States attitude is only apparent. It is the result of a legitimate act of war, that is, the cutting of German cables by a hostile force. It is in the order of things that the belligerent who has not been able to protect himself on that point should bear the consequences of it and it cannot be the duty of a neutral power to reestablish between the belligerents a balance that has been destroyed by a legitimate act of war.