This government has already
taken occasion to inform the Imperial German Government that it cannot
admit the adoption of such measures or such a warning of danger to
operate as in any degree an abbreviation of the rights of American
shipmasters or of American citizens bound on lawful errands as
passengers on merchant ships of belligerent nationality, and that it
must hold the Imperial German Government to a strict accountability for
any infringement of those rights, intentional or incidental. It does not
understand the Imperial German Government to question these rights. It
assumes, on the contrary, that the Imperial Government accept, as of
course, the rule that the lives of noncombatants, whether they be of
neutral citizenship or citizens of one of the nations at war, cannot
lawfully or rightfully be put in jeopardy by the capture or destruction
of an unarmed merchantman, and recognize also, as all other nations do,
the obligation to take the usual precaution of visit and search to
ascertain whether a suspected merchantman is in fact of belligerent
nationality or is in fact carrying contraband of war under a neutral
flag.
[Illustration: Photograph]
Copyright Underwood and Underwood. N. Y.
THE LUSITANIA
The sinking of this great liner by a German submarine, with the loss
of more than a thousand lives, caused a thrill of horror throughout
all neutral nations and crystallized public opinion in the United
States into a fierce resentment of German barbarism which indirectly
led to the entry into the World War.
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