File No. 841.711/677
[Enclosure]
The British Foreign
Office to John Scheepers and
Company
No. 113505/X
London,
June 23, 1916
.
Gentlemen: I am directed by Lord Robert Cecil to thank you for
your letter of May 27 in which you take issue with a statement made
by him to a correspondent of the New York
Times. This statement was that great care is taken to
forward mails between neutral countries taken from neutral ships for
examination by the British censors, as quickly as possible. You say
that during the last six or eight months your correspondence with
Holland has suffered great delay.
Lord Robert Cecil’s
statement was intended as an assurance that the postal censorship
had been perfecting its organization, and that, from the time at
which he spoke, Americans could be confident that their letters
would suffer only slight delay owing to detention by the censors. He
did not intend to exclude the possibility that delays had occurred
in earlier days when the British authorities first began to examine
mails carried on neutral ships. But even if such delays did actually
occur, it is by no means certain, and in fact it is in many cases
unlikely, that those delays were due to the British censorship.
Mails only began to be taken from neutral ships for censorship last
December and it is therefore quite clear that delays experienced by
you from six to eight months ago cannot have been due to the
censorship of these mails. As there has been a great deal of
misunderstanding on this subject, I am to explain the following
points:
The American mails censored in the United Kingdom must be divided
into two classes, each of which is dealt with by a special organisation:
- 1.
-
Terminal mails, i. e., mails
originating in or destined for the United King dom. The
censorship of these mails is one of the universally
recognised rights of sovereignty and it has been exercised
since the beginning of the war without any protest being
made against it by neutral governments.
- 2.
-
Mails neither originating in nor destined
for the United Kingdom.
These must be further subdivided into three groups:
- (a)
-
Transit mails, i. e., mails between
European countries and the United States intended by the
office of despatch to pass through the United Kingdom; for
example, mails sent from Rotterdam to this country for
retransmission from Liverpool to the United States. Such
mails are forwarded by the British Post Office and enjoy the
facilities afforded by it to British mails, and the right of
censorship over them while in transit through British
territory in, time of war is generally admitted. This right,
however, was not exerted at the beginning of this war and
censorship of these transit mails only came into force in
April 1915.
- (b)
- Mails carried by neutral ships which normally call at a
British port or enter British jurisdiction without any form
of compulsion.
- (c)
- Mails carried by neutral ships which would not enter
British jurisdiction without some form of compulsion.
The first ship from the United States to Holland from which the mails
were removed was the Noorderdijk. These mails
were landed at Ramsgate on the 18th December 1915, arrangements not
having then been completed to remove them at Falmouth. The first
ship from Holland to the United States from which the mails were
removed was the Noordam which entered the
Downs on the 5th December. It is to classes (b) and (e) exclusively
that the present discussions between this Government and other
neutral governments refer, while class (c) alone is covered by the
Hague convention.
Most of the annoyance caused in the United States by the action of
His Majesty’s Government seems to arise from a confusion between the
above kinds
[Page 612]
of censorship.
It is to the last two kinds only that Lord Robert Cecil’s interview
referred, and the British authorities are making every effort to
perfect their organisation so that the necessity of examining this
class of mail may not involve long delays. But during the time that
the censorship of these particular mails has been in force, many
other factors have occurred causing delay quite independently of the
action of the British Government. Sailings from Holland have been
very irregular, owing to the mine fields sown by the Germans outside
Rotterdam, and have at times been held up altogether, as for
instance after the sinking of the Tubantia.
As you are aware, the Dutch mail boats now proceed round the north
of Scotland and go south, calling both at Kirkwall and at Falmouth
before crossing the Atlantic, and this in itself causes considerable
delay. So far as the censorship is concerned, the delay in the case
of mails from Holland to the United States will not be greater than
between four and five days from the date when the mails are unloaded
at Kirkwall to the date when they are handed by the censors to the
post office to be sent on. The delay caused to mails from the United
States to Holland will not be longer than six days in all. The post
office will always forward the mail by the next boat to its
destination, and whether delay occurs in this operation will solely
depend upon the regularity of sailings. It will be seen that letters
contained in the outward mails will sometimes, and those in the
inward mails generally, reach their destination as early as or
earlier than if left on board the Dutch ship. When the urgent need
of examining first-class mails, in order to intercept those postal
packets which are admittedly liable to be treated as contraband, was
first realised, it would have been possible at once to have brought
the organisation of the censorship to the level of efficiency it has
since reached by collecting hurriedly a large enough number of
examiners, but it was thought that infinitely more harm would be
done to neutral correspondence by allowing their letters to be
handled by persons engaged hastily whose character and reliability
had not been thoroughly tested than by subjecting the letters at
first to some slight delay. The necessary staff has now been
carefully selected and this delay eliminated.
In conclusion Lord Robert
Cecil would be much obliged if you would furnish him
with more exact particulars of the letters which you complain of
being delayed, giving where possible, the date of the letter, the
mail boat by which it was despatched, and if registered, the
registration number of the packet, in order that inquiry may be made
into each case.
As there is so much misunderstanding on these points, and in the hope
that the above explanation may do something to make the position
clear, Lord Robert Cecil
proposes to publish the text of this letter for general
information.
I am [etc.]
[File copy not signed]
