What came nearer to a flagrant violation of the _Sussex_ agreement was the destruction by submarine torpedoes of the Anchor passenger liner _California_ without warning off the Irish coast with 230 persons on board. The vessel sailed from New York for Glasgow on January 28, 1917, and its crew and passengers included a sprinkling of Americans. There were no American casualties; but attacks on passenger liners without warning, regardless of the menace to American life, formed the crux of the various crises between the United States and Germany, and the sinking of the _California_, as an "overt act," therefore brought the breaking point nearer and nearer. The loss of life was forty-one, thirteen passengers and twenty-eight of the crew being drowned. The vessel sank in nine minutes and the submarine made no effort to save the lives of its victims. The loss of two British steamers, the _Japanese Prince_ and the _Mantola_, sunk without warning, added to the growing indictment against Germany in the consequent jeopardizing of American lives. There were thirty American cattlemen on board the _Japanese Prince_. With the remainder of the crew they took to the boats, and after drifting about for several hours were saved by a passing ship. An American doctor on board the _Mantola_ was among the latter's survivors. The next attack on American shipping was the sinking of the _Lyman M. Law_, a sailing vessel loaded with lumber from Maine to Italy, by a submarine off the coast of Sardinia in the Mediterranean. The crew, seven of whom were American, were saved. There was no warning; the crew were ordered to debark, a bomb was placed on board, and the vessel was blown up and sank in flames. The destruction of the Cunard liner _Laconia_, without warning, followed. Three American passengers were lost, two of them women, mother and daughter, who died from exposure in one of the boats. The vessel was torpedoed in the Irish Sea at 10.30 p. m. on February 25, 1917, and it was not until 4 o'clock the next morning that the survivors, scantily clad, were rescued in a heavy sea. All these outrages were readily chargeable as overt acts, any single one of which could have constituted a cause for war, if the Administration was looking for one. But Germany's offenses, viewed singly, were passed over; it was their cumulative force that was providing the momentum to hostilities. Two American freighters, the _Orleans_ and the _Rochester_, left New York on February 9, 1917, without guns or contraband, bound for Bordeaux, France, and were the first craft to leave an American port after Germany issued her terrifying order condemning all neutral vessels found in the new danger zone.