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Accordingly, the proposition was submitted secretly to the Allies, got a prompt, flat rejection from Foreign Secretary Grey. Aggrieved, Secretary Lansing wrote to the President: "It seems to me that the British Government expected us to denounce submarine warfare as inhuman and to deny the right to use submarines in at tacking commercial vessels; and that these statements by Sir Edward Grey evidence his great disappointment that we have failed to be the instrument to save Britishcommerce from attack by Germany. . . ." By April, Allied rejection of the U. S. proposal was unanimous and had been docilely accepted by Secretary Lansing and President Wilson. Years later Sir Edward Grey, a Viscount, retired to feeding wild ducks on his Northumberland estate, was to write in his memoirs that the Allies, utterly dependent on the U. S. for supplies, would have had to accept any terms on which the U. S. insisted.
With the Allied rejections in his pocket, Secretary Lansing put up a stern, uncompromising front when Germany's Ambassador Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff called at his office one day late in April 1916. A stenographer set down their conversation verbatim. Excerpts:
Lansing: Submarine warfare should stop against commercial vessels, unless visit & search is observed.
Bernstorff: That, of course, is impossible. Germany cannot abandon submarine warfare. No government could come out and say: "We give up the use of submarines." They would have to resign. . . .
Lansing: I do not know how your Government can modify submarine warfare and make it effective and at the same time obey the law and the dictates of humanity.
Bernstorff: Humanity! Of course, War is never humane.
Lansing: "Humanity" is a relative expression when used with "war," but the whole tendency in the growth of international law in regard to warfare in the past 125 years has been to relieve non-combatants of needless suffering.
Bernstorff: Of course, I think it would be an ideal state of affairs, but our enemies violate all the rules and you insist on their being applied to Germany.
Lansing: One deals with life; the other with property. . . .
Bernstorff: Then I am to understand that you do not recognize the law of retaliation?
Lansing: We do not recognize retaliation when it affects the rights of commerce.
Trade. Three months later President Wilson, outraged by British interference with U. S. commerce and by the British "blacklist" of U. S. firms accused of dealing with the Central Powers, wrote to his most intimate friend & adviser, Col. Edward Mandell House: "I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies. . . . I am seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies. It is becoming clear to me that there lies latent in this policy the wish to prevent our merchants getting a foothold in markets which Great Britain has hitherto controlled and all but dominated."