undamental
importance.

"The Government of the United States, therefore, desires to call
the attention of the Imperial German Government with the utmost
earnestness to the fact that the objection to their present method
of attack against the trade of their enemies lies in the practical
impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce
without disregarding those rules of fairness, reason, justice, and
humanity, which all modern opinion regards as imperative. It is
practically impossible for the officers of a submarine to visit a
merchantman at sea and examine her papers and cargo. It is practically
impossible for them to make a prize of her; and, if they cannot
put a prize crew on board of her, they cannot sink her without
leaving her crew and all on board of her to the mercy of the sea
in her small boats.... Manifestly submarines cannot be used against
merchantmen, as the last few weeks have shown, without an inevitable
violation of many sacred principles of justice and humanity.

"American citizens act within their indisputable rights in taking
their ships and in travelling wherever their legitimate business
calls them on the high seas, and exercise those rights in what
should be the well-justified confidence that their lives will not be
endangered by acts done in clear violation of universally acknowledged
international obligations, and certainly in the confidence that
their own Government will sustain them in the exercise of their
rights.

"There was recently published in the newspapers of the United States,
I regret to inform the Imperial German Government, a formal warning,
purporting to come from the Imperial Germany Embassy at Washington,
addressed to the people of the United States, and stating, in effect,
that any citizen of the United States who exercised his right of
free travel upon the seas, would do so at his peril if his journey
should take him within the zone of waters within which the Imperial
German Navy was using submarines against the commerce of Great
Britain and France, notwithstanding the respectful, but very earnest
protests of his Government, the Government of the United States.
I do not refer to this for the purpose of calling the attention
of the Imperial German Government at this time to the surprising
irregularity of a communication from the Imperial Germany Embassy
at Washington addressed to the people of the United States through
the newspapers, but only for the p