because there is something so much greater to do than fight; there is a distinction waiting for this nation that no nation has ever yet got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.

On December 7, 1915, in a message to Congress regarding German plots and the German-American intrigues, he said:

We have stood apart, studiously neutral. It was our manifest duty to do so. Not only did we have no part or interest in the policies which seem to have brought the conflict on; it was necessary, if a universal catastrophe was to be avoided, that a limit should be set to the sweep of destructive war and that some part of the great family of nations should keep the processes of peace alive, if only to prevent collective economic ruin and the breakdown throughout the world of the industries by which its populations are fed and sustained. It was manifestly the duty of the self-governed nations of this hemisphere to redress, if possible, the balance of economic loss and confusion in the other, if they could do nothing more.

This last was uttered by President Wilson when certain individuals were introducing panic in the essential industries of the United States by means of fires, attempts at dynamiting, the destruction of vessels, and organizations of espionage; when the expulsion of the Austrian Ambassador Dumba and that of Herr Dernburg, the imprisonment of Lieutenant Fay and of his twenty-five companions, the suit against the Hamburg-Amerika, the San Francisco plot, the affair of the Welland Canal and that of Lieutenant Wolf von Igel, et cetera, had already taken place. At that time also the steamers William P. Frye, Falaba, Aguila, Cushing, Gulflight, Lusitania, Armenian, Orduna, Leelanaw, Arabic and Hesperian had been torpedoed, involving loss to the United States. Already the American petroleum vessels Portland, Lama and Vico had been captured.

Many other direct crimes against the rights and interests of the United States and against international law followed in succession up to April, 1917, before the patience of the people of this country had become exhausted. Even on March 5th of that year, President Wilson, when he appeared before Congress to become invested for the second time with the presidency, said, referring to the thirty-one months that had passed since the breaking out of the war: "And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of it."

The United States had taken one step forward, in spite of herself: she had entered upon armed neutrality, which President Wilson de

fined in that same discourse with phrases filled with humanitarian sentiments:

We have been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed neutrality since it seems that in no other way can we demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forego. We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights as we see them and a more immediate association with the great struggle itself.

In recommending the declaration of war on April 2d, President Wilson said, in his celebrated message to Congress:

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. was not with their previous knowledge or approval.

It

So profound was the understanding which the American Government had of its duties, and so serious was its decision to break a neutrality which it would have desired always to maintain, that, on June 14, 1917, two months after war was declared, President Wilson, in an address on Flag Day, still considered it proper to explain and to justify what were the grave and repeated causes that led to the declaration of April 6th:

It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf.

If the United States, with all its formidable power, entered the war only after numerous direct and indirect provocations, and upholding to the end the principle of neutrality as a sacred duty, is it logical to think that a weak country like Chile, incapable of adding any appreciable weight to the Allied cause and without having suffered any serious or immediate assaults upon her sovereignty or interests by an act of Germany, was in a position to enter the war?

Would it have been worthy of the antecedents of Chile, which at

other times was able generously to defend the liberty of Peru against the aggressions of Spain, to take a fictitiously warlike attitude upon a simple piece of paper, without making any sacrifice of men or money, that is, to declare war and not to make war? What would have been the juridical basis, the reasonable pretext, for such a fiction? It may be said—and the cheap pragmatists have said it-that she might have contributed by means of legislative measures to the suppression of German commerce within her borders; by not permitting any manifestations of German opinion; and by confiscating the property of Germans.

This may be answered by saying, first of all, that German commerce fell into inanition because of the blockade of Germany and the blacklists. The merchants who were able to sustain themselves did so by carrying on business with goods from North America. To the second, I will say that opinion in favor of Germany was not great in Chile, and that, on the other hand, it was not and could not have been silenced in the Latin-American countries that had declared themselves to be in a state of war with Germany. Confiscation would not have been effected with advantage to the country or to the cause, except in respect of the interned or refuged German vessels; and they were, in general, laid up, because of injuries done to their engines. Germany, on her part, would have compensated herself by confiscating the deposits of Chilean fiscal gold in the German banks and by disavowing certain considerable credits that Chilean establishments held against German firms. It is worthy of note, besides, that none of the Latin-American countries that adopted the fiction of war had recourse to confiscation, which is advantageous only when there is actual war and is therefore burdensome.

On the other hand, Chile, by turning over her entire production of nitrates to the United States and England, as we shall see later, supplied the manufactories of explosives with raw material without violating her neutrality.

I shall investigate, first, in the light of public documents, what was the duty of Chile during the conflict, in order to show, afterward, that the neutrality of my country was found worthy of the commendation of the great victorious Powers, without wounding the sentiments of the German people.

On August 3, 1914, the Government of Chile was informed by the Imperial German Legation in Santiago that the German Empire had

been at war with Russia from the first day of August. The same third day, the Minister of Foreign Relations notified the German Minister that Chile would preserve neutrality during the conflict. An identical reply was given to the other communications by the other legations, as the conflict continued to extend in Europe, and new "states of war" were produced.

On August 7th, Chile declared that, although she had not ratified them, she would adopt the conventions of the Second International Conference of The Hague relating to the rights and duties of neutrals in time of war, as the only authoritative rules to which the conduct of the authorities and inhabitants of the republic, in the observance of neutrality, ought to be adjusted.1

On August 14th, a decree of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, communicated to the Ministry of Marine, adopted a similar resolution in respect of the Declaration of the London Naval Conference of 1909, which had not been ratified by the Government of Chile.

Upon these two juridical bases and upon the general principles of the laws of nations, Chile began her career as a neutral country. Since from the beginning the Government desired to exercise all its care in maintaining this character, it ordered that, as soon as possible, certain vessels of the national navy should be stationed in the principal ports of the republic to render compliance with the rules of neutrality effective, as far as might be possible with the means at hand, as provided by the Hague Convention.

Immediate instructions were given to the authorities to exert every possible effort to render the purposes of neutrality of the Government of Chile always manifest. During the first months of the war, the Government of Chile issued several decrees to the same intent, and it is a satisfaction to say that the acts of the authorities and citizens were in hearty conformity with them.2 The Government recommended the federal authorities to abstain from expressing in public opinions unfavorable to any of the belligerents, a respect in which 1 Memoria del Ministro de Relaciones de Chile, December, 1914-December, 1915, Santiago, Chile, 1918, pages 83-84.

2 A decree that attracted attention was the one that established as a jurisdictional sea of Chile, and therefore neutral, the interior waters of the Straits of Magellan and of the southern channels, even in the parts in which the shores are more than six miles distant from each other. This gave occasion to an exchange of notes with the Government of the Argentine Republic, which expressed itself as satisfied with the explanation of Chile.

Chile did not go so far as the United States when President Wilson asked for neutrality of action and thought, not only of the public functionaries, but also of all the citizens.

Chile, like the other maritime nations of South America, comprehended that the observance of neutrality would impose upon her severe sacrifices, greater, perhaps, than upon other countries, because her coasts were more extended, because of the difficulty of keeping watch upon the archipelagoes of the south, and because she had under her jurisdiction the Straits of Magellan, an essential passage for vessels between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

To prevent, as far as possible, complications growing out of the presence of belligerent units in South American waters, Chile used her efforts with the other governments to induce them to adopt uniformly the convention of The Hague relative to the rights and duties of neutrals in the event of maritime war.

Among the measures of the greatest importance adopted by the Government of Chile at the beginning of the war,3 I ought to mention the one that absolutely prohibited any merchant vessel-in compliance with the Declaration of London-while it remained in Chilean waters from using wireless telegraphy, she being obliged to disconnect some essential part of her apparatus in order that the prohibitions might not be in vain, and to remove the antennæ of such apparatus when a merchant ship, national or foreign, should have to remain in a port of the republic for more than four days. The safeguarding

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3 The Government of Chile took steps at once to abate abuses in the expressions of the press and in public demonstrations, and to regulate telegraphic communications with the outside world and postal correspondence with the Central Powers, the relations between the foreign diplomatic agents and the Chilean functionaries, the issuance of passports, et cetera.

4 The official communications of the Minister of Foreign Relations to the Minister of Marine of August 14, 1914, contained in the memorial cited, pages 84-86.

5 This last provision was made in compliance with a demand presented by the Minister of France, October 8, 1914, supported by the Minister of Great Britain. The Minister of France said: "Referring to a conversation which I had the honor to hold with your excellency the first of this month, I consider it my duty to bring to your excellency's knowledge some new information which I have received with regard to the employment of wireless telegraphy in Chile in the interests of the German naval forces, and which constitutes an infraction of the rules and regulations of neutrality laid down by your excellency's government. According to this information, which may well be a subject for serious investi