File No. 839.00/1963
The Minister of the Dominican Republic to the Secretary of State
Washington, December 4, 1916.
Mr. Secretary: In compliance with instructions received from my Government I have the honor to lay before the Government of the United States of America through your excellency the formal protest by which the legitimate Government of the Dominican Republic finally and irrevocably resists the unexampled act in contempt of the sovereignty of the Dominican people which on the 29th of November, brought to a climax the illegal course of the forces of American intervention in the territory of the Dominican Republic: the act is the proclamation of Captain Knapp, commander of the said forces, by authority of your excellency’s Government, in the capacity of Military Governor of the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican Government bases its protest on the following:
1st. The United States has always recognized the international entity of the Dominican Republic and it was in that capacity that the Dominican Republic concluded with the United States of America the Convention of 1907.
2nd. If the American Government considered as is stated in the proclamation which installs Captain Knapp as Military Governor of the Republic “that previous Governments of the Dominican Republic had violated Clause 3 of the said Convention by increasing, for causes beyond their control, the internal debt of the Dominican Republic, which interpretation differs from that put on the said Clause 3 by the Dominican Government, the American Government only had the right to sue out against the Dominican State through the proceedings in force for such cases the legal consequences of the fault the latter was supposed to have fallen into, but by no means that of sitting in supreme judgment of the contract and destroying, by way of penalty, the sovereignty of the Dominican people.
3rd. Nor could the Washington Government any more derive that right from the alleged state of domestic unrest which is also invoked in the aforesaid proclamation, since no State has the right to interfere in the domestic questions of another State, and, on the other hand, the sentiments of brotherly friendship which always governed the relations of the two States are not to be understood as affording the Government of this nation, in the face of such an occasion, anything but an opportunity to discharge the imperative duty put upon it by its exceptional situation on this continent and its constant humanitarian promises toward the several autonomous units of America whose evolution, socially or politically, has not yet reached the prodigious development of the exemplary North American Commonwealth. But it is a humane duty whose correlative can be no more than a humane right; such a right as that which in 1912 brought to the Dominican Republic the noble Peace Commission that strengthened the ties of the Dominican family’s gratitude to the Northern Republic, again such as that which brought the Lind Commission to the Mexican [Page 245] Capital in 1913, that which gave birth to the idea of the Central American Court of Justice and many other agencies of true American brotherhood which strengthened in the same manner the sentiment of well deserved admiration, profound respect and earned gratitude from the Latin-American peoples for your excellency’s Government and country. But never, never, a right which ceases to be one when it goes so far as to smother traditions and demolish attributes that are so inherent in human personality and in the very life of politico-social entities as to place beyond conception any possible finality if that finality is not to begin with cementing its own virtuality with an unequivocal and permanent recognition of those prerogatives, and
4th. A state of war which alone could have justified such a proceeding on the part of the Government of the United States toward the Dominican Republic has never existed between the two nations.
And therefore by acting as it has with the Dominican Republic, your excellency’s Government plainly violated in the first place the fundamental principles of public international law which lay down as an invariable rule of public order for the nations the reciprocal respect of the sovereignty of each and every one of the free states of the civilized world, and in the second place the principles which guide the doctrine of Pan Americanism which also hallow the inviolability of American nationalities; principles which may be said to have found their highest authorities in the many official declarations of the learned President of the United States; the Constitutional Government of the Dominican Republic hereby formulates, in addition, the concomitant reservation of its rights which it will vindicate at the proper time.
Saluting [etc.]