In this connexion the following summary of the views of the American news par upon the question of France seizures on American ships is given by the Literary Digest" of December 25 In its efforts to defend American rights on the high seas this Government is now involved in diplomatic disputes not only with Germany, Austria, and England, but with France as. well. When last week the French cruiser Descartes stopped three American ships, the Coamo, Carolina, and San Juan, plying between New York and Porto Rice, and seized four Austrians and four Germans who were on board, our press unanimously denounced the act as an indefensible violation of international law, and our State Department promptly despatched a protest to the French Government. While there seems to be a widespread editorial cxpectation that France will accept our view of this incident and accede to our demand that these eight prisoners be released, there is nevertheless much irritation over this new challenging of a. point of international law which, as the Philadelphia "Record" remarks, "we had supposed was settled by the Trent case'—that famous and almost parallel international incident of Civil War days when an American cruiser stopped the British ship Trent and took from among her passengers the Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell. This seizure, denounced in England as "wanton piracy," caused a furore which brought the two nations to the verge of war, but trouble was averted by Presi dent Lincoln's recognition of the justice of England's protest and by the release of the two prisoners. Although France was not involved in this affair of 1861, the "Record" recalls the fact that "she deemed (it worth while to put on record her belief that the British claim was perfectly just." "Are England and France," asks this Philaadelphia paper, "now prepared to say in so many words that they are going to do what they denied our right to do?"
We are also reminded that these seizures near Porto Rice make the second incident of the kind be tween this country and France during the present war. In November, 1914, the French cruiser Conde stopped the American steamer Windber about 250 miles south of Kingston, Jamaica, and seized her steward, August Piepenbrink, a German who had filed his declaration of intention to become an American citizen, Diplomatic protests from Washington brought about his release "out of courtesy to the United States," the French Government at the same time declining to concede the principle for which our State Department contended—namely, that "there is no justification in international law for the removal of an enemy subject from a neutral vessel on the high inal f
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.