File No. 711.673/66.

The Secretary of State to Ambassador Morgenthau .

No. 355.]

Sir: The Department acknowledges the receipt of your despatch No. 488, dated September 22, 1915, enclosing a copy and translation of a note verbale from the Sublime Porte, dated September 4, 1915, in which the Embassy is informed that henceforth all communications to the Sublime Porte in which the Capitulations are considered to be still in force will be disregarded.

You are instructed to notify the Ottoman Government that the Department cannot agree with the position taken by it in this matter; but on the contrary holds that a convention by which one country gives the rights of sovereignty within its territory to another country is absolute in its nature, and the grantor, having parted with the rights unconditionally, cannot resume their exercise except by a reconveyance or a formal consent on the part of the grantee who is entitled to exercise them.

Extraterritoriality holds much the same relation to sovereignty over persons that international servitudes hold to sovereignty over territory. In both cases the unconditional grant of sovereign rights cannot be abrogated without the assent of the grantee, the owner.

The chief reason for obtaining the right of extraterritoriality is to insure protection for the life, liberty and interests of the nationals of one state while within the territory of the state granting the right. If the surrender of extraterritorial rights lessens such protection, a government cannot relinquish the right without violating its manifest duty. As to whether the surrender of the right will lessen the safety of its nationals within the foreign territory, their government alone is in a position to decide. Following the practice in similar cases with other countries in which the United States exercised extraterritorial [Page 1306] rights under treaty, this Government will, upon the establishment of judicial and administrative reforms in Turkey, consider whether they are of such a character as to warrant the surrender of the extraterritorial rights of American citizens in the Ottoman Empire.

You are instructed to notify the Ottoman Government in conclusion that the United States will hold it responsible for any injury which may be occasioned to the United States or to its citizens, through any interference on the part of Ottoman authorities with the extraterritorial rights possessed by the United States and its citizens in the Ottoman Empire.

I am [etc.]

Robert Lansing.