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OCR
4 THE VITAL ISSUE
accordance with the interests of its own citizens or
subjects.
This is the American doctrine, and also the British
doctrine, as distinctly announced by the British gov-
ernment in 1870, when it was applied to by the North
German government to embargo the exportation of
war munitions to France.
The only limitation which the international obli-
gation of neutrality toward all belligerents imposes
upon the exercise of this domestic power by each
neutral country for itself is that if an embargo be
laid it shall be directed against all belligerents alike,
and if it be not laid or be laid and then lifted it shall
be so toward all belligerents alike. It is quite clear
that if the obligation should reach any further than
this it would impair the sovereignty and independ-
ence of the neutral nation in regulating its foreign
commerce and would bind it, willingly or un-
willingly, to supply belligerent nations with the
means of pursuing a policy possibly quite disastrous
to the interests of the neutral country.
In other words, the laying or not laying or the
lifting of an embargo is not a topic of international
law but of the domestic law of each nation, and each
nation may, so far as international law is concerned,
exercise the power of so doing at any time without
the slightest concern as to how the consequences’ of
the same may affect the fortunes or interests of the
belligerent nations. -
Consequences, possible or probable, are too uncer-
tain, too unfixcd, and too disputable to be admitted
as limitations upon the sovereign independence of
a nation. I have never before heard nor read of
any minister of foreign affairs giving away the inde-
pendence of his country in this manner. Even if
there were good ground for the declaration it would,
to say the least, be novel diplomacy to make it. Cer-
tainly so when it is not necessary to the maintenance
of the right contended for.
The second question in connection with such a ‘
declaration which suggests itself is who, under our
constitution, has the power to make an authoritative
declaration of this kind, so that it willbind this coun-
try over against a belligerent power and thus give
that power a cause of war against us in case we in-
fract it? The constitution does not expressly pro-
vide, but all the principles of interpretation of our
organic law give but one reply, and that is that either
the body which has the power to lay the embargo is
the body which determines for this country whether
its act comes into conflict with any higher law or
else the Supreme Court of the United States.
By the general principles of public jurisprudence
each country is held to know the constitutional law
and custom of every other, and no country can hold
any other under any obligation created by the agree-
mentor declaration of any organ not constitutionally
authorized to make the same. Neither the congress,
the department of government which alone, under
our constitution, can lay an embargo, nor the Su-
preme Court of the United States has ever declared
A that it would be unneutral for this government to
lay an embargo at any time or for any reasons which
might seem proper to it, and therefore this country
is not legally bound and cannot be legally bound by
any declaration of the State Department that it is
or would be.
Neither, therefore, is any citizen of these United
States nor any combination of citizens placing the
country in any danger of a just war being made upon
it by any foreign power by agitating in favor of an
embargo on the exportation of arms and munitions
of war. They are only exercising their constitutional
right of free speech and of petitioning the govern-
ment for the redress of what they consider to be a
grievance. If any embarrassment should come to
the country in consequence of such action on their
part the responsibility for it could not be charged to
them, but to whomsoever made that unwarranted
and unnecessary declaration.
I am old enough to have had the experience in the
history of our country of a somewhat similar and
equally pointed case. I refer to the famous Dred
Scott decision, where the Supreme Court of the
United States, under the pressure of the slaveholder
plutocracy, declared that congress did not have the
power to exclude or abolish slavery from the terri-
tories of the United States, and many of the leading
newspapers declared that anybody who should there-
after insist upon congress doing so would be disloyal
and a traitor to the interests of his country.
Now this dictum of the court was not necessary to
sustain the judgment of the court. It was obiter
dictum, as the lawyers call it, and Mr. Lincoln at
once attacked it as such and held, amid the fiercest
denunciations heaped upon him by the newspapers,
that it did not restrain congress from prohibiting
slavery in the territories nor make the conduct of
any man disloyal to his country who should agitate
for such an act by congress.
Mr. Lincoln went further and said, that even had
the judgment of the court been that congress could
not prohibit slavery in the territories, still any Amer-
ican citizen would be only exercising his right of
free speech, who should agitate for convincing the
court that it had committed error and persuading it
to reverse its judgment, or for moving the people
to secure an amendment to the constitution overrid-
ing the judgment of the court. There-was danger of
civil war, it was said, following upon such agitation.
Civil war did follow it. But were Mr. Lincoln and
the Republican party responsible for it, or were those
who made this agitation necessary and inevitable by
attempting to crush the freedom of speech by a ju-
dicial declaration and to extend slavery over the ter-
ritories of the union?
Now we have come around again to a similar sit-
uation.
When the war in Europe broke out in August of
1914, the circle of high finance in this country was
highly disturbedby it. These men thought that the
moment had arrived for a new period of prosperity
and to see that for which they had been for some;
time impatiently waiting indefinitely postpongd, was
a great disappointment. In their anger they looked
about, as men usually do, for the scapegoat. They
knew very little about European politics and Euro-
pean history, and they had no appreciation whatso-
ever of the idea that, possibly, the world had arrived
at one of those epochal moments when its move.
ments are not guided by any particular man or set
of men but by the necessities of the many, by the
forces of progress, by the Destiny of Man.
One European personality, however, stood out
above all others in the scope of their vision. ' Not the
Czar of all the Russians. He was to them not much
more than a title. Nor the king of Great Britain and
Ireland. He was overshadowed by his ministers. Nor
the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. He was known
to them chiefiy as the oldest ruler in Europe. N0,-
the President of the French. It is doubtful if many