The Secretary of State to the British Ambassador (Spring Rice)
Excellency: I have given consideration to your excellency’s note of the 1st instant, relative to the case of the Appam, now libeled in the United States courts.
In reply I have the honor to state that the Government of the United States does not concede that “the question of the status of the Appam and the treatment which should have been accorded her from the moment when she was brought within United States waters is primarily one between His Majesty’s Government and that of the United States, and not one between the British owners of the ship and those who are in temporary charge of her.” In the view of this Government the United States has no concern whatever with the actual “status” of the Appam, if by that term is meant whether she is good prize or no prize, and whether she now belongs to the German Government or to her original owners.
As to the treatment to be accorded the vessel, this Government holds that the owners of the vessel are the direct parties in interest, and that, being unwilling to await the decision and action of this Government, and having had recourse to legal remedies to preserve their asserted rights, they must, according to the rule of practice which His Majesty’s Government have contended for and endeavored to enforce with exceptional vigor during the present war with regard to the detention of ships and cargoes of American citizens, exhaust their legal remedies with a resulting denial of justice before the questions involved can be taken up through diplomatic channels. Consequently, there can not as yet, in the view of this Government, be entertained any diplomatic reclamation by the British Government on behalf of the owners of the vessel in question.
The Government of the United States is not “claiming to escape amiability for failure to carry out its obligations”; it is maintaining that the interested parties, having selected an alternative remedy— that is, the judicial remedy—their Government have not, at least as yet, any grounds for initiating a diplomatic discussion of the questions involved in the case while it is pending before a United States court.
Accept [etc.]
[On March 6, 1917, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered its opinion affirming the decree of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, of July 29, 1916. 243 U. S. Rep. 124.]