Office of the Historian

File No. 763.72112/226a

The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard)1

Department of State,
Washington, October 24, 1914, 5 p.m.

[Telegram]

489. Department’s August 6, 1 p.m.,2 [and your October 22],3 Declaration of London. Please inform the Government to which you are accredited that Department’s suggestion to belligerents as to adoption, for the sake of uniformity, of the declaration as a temporary code of naval warfare during the present war, has been withdrawn because of the unwillingness of some of the belligerents to accept the declaration without modification, and that therefore this Government will insist that the rights and duties of the United States and its citizens in the present war be defined by the existing rules of international law and the treaties of the United States, irrespective of the provisions of the declaration, and that this Government reserves to itself the right to enter a protest or demand in each case in which those rights and duties so defined are violated, or their free exercise interfered with by the authorities of the belligerent governments.

Lansing
  1. The same to the Ambassadors in Austria–Hungary, France, and Russia and the Minister in Belgium; and on October 29 to the Ambassadors in Argentina and Brazil (File No. 763.72112/370b).↩
  2. Ante, p. 216.↩
  3. The Ambassador’s telegram of October 22 (File No. 763.72112/214) not printed; it conveyed a summary of the German memorial printed in full as enclosure to his despatch No. 234 of October 21, post, p. 263 ↩