s not
a party must neither discriminate in favor of nor against any citizen,
product, or locality of the United States in accepting or refusing
consignments on pain of clearance being refused.

The same penalty attached to vessels of any belligerent which denied
to American ships and citizens the same privileges of commerce which
the offending belligerent accorded to its own vessels or to those of
any other nationality. An alternative penalty, to be exercised by the
President in his discretion, denied to such offending belligerents'
ships and citizens the privileges of commerce with the United States
until reciprocal liberty of trade was restored. A third provision
aimed at penalizing a belligerent who prohibited the importation at
its ports of any American product, not injurious to health or morals,
by barring importation into the United States from the offending
country similar or other articles.

The prevailing view was that the exercise of such reprisals by the
President would virtually mean nonintercourse in trade and involve
serious international complications. An isolated English impression,
only of moment because it placed the aspects of the legislation in a
nutshell, recognized that while it might be merely a "flourish" having
a special virtue on the eve of a presidential election, the reprisals
were aimed at the Allies, primarily against Great Britain, and were
popular in the United States as a commercial club that could be
wielded instead of having recourse to the threats that brought Germany
to respect American demands. But the British official attitude as
taken by Lord Robert Cecil was unmoved. "It is not likely," he said,
"that Great Britain will change her blacklist policy at the request of
the United States. The idea that Great Britain is adopting a
deliberate policy with which to injure American trade is the purest
moonshine, since outside of our own dominions our trade with the
United States is the most important. Of course, natural trade rivalry
exists, but no responsible statesman in this country would dream of
proposing an insane measure designed to injure American commerce."

The blacklist was the last straw which provoked the retaliatory
legislation. But, alone of the seemingly unadjustable disputes pending
between the United States and Great Britain, it was on the blacklist
issue that the latter had an unanswerable defense. The British stand
left official Washington's complaint bereft of found