The strangest part of the correspondence remains to be noted. The United States Government, in July, lodged a _caveat_, intimating that it ‘will not recognise the validity of Prize Court proceedings taken under restraints imposed by British municipal law in derogation of the rights of American citizens under international law.’ The Government has thus indicated the retaliatory measures it proposes to take against Great Britain; yet it has failed to see that the veiled irony of the paragraph just quoted from the Protest applies in its entirety to this reprisal. In so far as it relates to executive action, it proposes to accomplish the impossible. Prize Court judgments are _in rem_; they pass property, and if possession has followed not even the United States Government can undo it, for there would not be even a tenth point on which it could seize; and if possession has not followed, Government action would be brought up short by the law. Further, in so far as it relates to judicial action, the intention appears to be to give an instruction to the American Courts how in the circumstances they are to deal with the decisions of the English Prize Courts. Thus the constitutional principle of the independence of the Judiciary from the Executive is put in jeopardy, and the Government would again be brought up short by the law. And in so far as it relates to the law itself, the proposed action professes to decide favourably to the present contention of the United States a difficult and complicated question of law--whether judgments based on a municipal law which, it is alleged, is a violation of international law are not entitled to recognition by foreign Courts, more especially if they are judgments _in rem_. Such a decision does not fall within the province of the Executive, but only of the Courts. So, as it was said aforetime in the British argument in the Behring Sea Arbitration, to all and every part of the different protests which have been made against our action by the United States Government, there is, with profound respect, ‘but one answer--the Law.’ In an Editorial Note in the May number of the _North American Review_, dealing with the relations between Great Britain and the United States after the detention of the _Wilhelmina_, this sentence occurs: If we should once admit the right of the Allies to forbid our sending foodstuffs to Germany, how could we deny the justice of Germany’s insistence that we should apply the same principle to England? And what would happen to the English people then? Surely, too, our British friends must realise that only the strictest adherence to international law makes it possible for us to furnish to the Allies the vast quantities of war munitions without which they could not hope to win.