ments of Germany and Austria, and
only sent to neutral ports with the object of concealing their true
destination.

From cablegrams and letters in the possession of the British
Government and produced in court, the statement charged, "it was clear
and that packers' agents in these neutral countries, and also several
of the consigners, who purported to be genuine neutral buyers, were
merely persons engaged by the packers on commission, or sent by the
packers from their German branches for the purpose of insuring the
immediate transit of these consignments to Germany.... No attempt was
made by any written or other evidence to explain away the damning
evidence of the telegrams and letters disclosed by the Crown. The
inference was clear and irresistible that no such attempt could be
made, and that any written evidence there was would have merely
confirmed the strong suspicion, amounting to a practical certainty,
that the whole of the operations of shipment to Copenhagen and other
neutral ports were a mere mask to cover a determined effort to
transmit vast quantities of supplies through to the German and
Austrian armies."

A portion of the Western press had denounced the confiscation as a
"British outrage" and as "robbery by prize court"; but the more
moderate Eastern view was that, while American business men had an
undoubted right to feed the German armies, if they could, they were in
the position of gamblers who had lost if the British navy succeeded in
intercepting the shipments.

Exaggerated values placed on American-owned goods held up for months
at Rotterdam and other neutral ports by British became largely
discounted on October 1, 1915, under the scrutiny of the Foreign Trade
Advisers of the State Department. These goods were German-made for
consignment to the United States, and would only be released if the
British Government were satisfied that they were contracted for by
American importers before March 1, 1915, the date on which the British
blockade of Germany began. Early protests against their detention
complained that $50,000,000 was involved; later the value of the
detained goods was raised to $150,000,000. But actual claims made by
American importers to the British Embassy, through the Foreign Trade
Advisers, seeking the release of the consignments, showed that the
amount involved was not much more than $11,000,000 and would not
exceed $15,000,000 at the most.

CHAPTER VII

SEIZURE OF SUSPECTED