Mr. Adee to Mr. Eustis .

No. 468.]

Sir: I have to inform you that your dispatch No. 327, of the 27th ultimo, inclosing a copy and translation of the charges and the sentence in the Waller case, and also a copy of your note of the 22d ultimo to Mr. Hanotaux, the minister of foreign affairs of France, in regard to the subject, have been received.

In view of the silence with which the French Government has met the repeated applications of your embassy for a copy of the evidence upon which a French military court condemned Mr. Waller, an American citizen, to twenty years’ imprisonment, the Department most em-emphatically approves of the tone of your note of the 22d ultimo to Mr. Hanotaux. The time for a tender treatment of the matter seems to have gone by.

You will continue to earnestly press not only for a copy of the evidence in the case, but also for your right in person, or for some one deputed by you, to see the prisoner.

The copy of the charge against Mr. Waller and of his sentence, which Mr. Hanotaux recently sent to you, had already, on the 24th of March last, been furnished to our consul at Tamatave by Captain Kiesel, of the French Navy, and forwarded to this Department by Mr. Wetter in his dispatch No. 88, of April 20, 1895.

Upon the receipt of the copy of Mr. Waller’s sentence, Mr. Wetter asked to be furnished with a copy of the evidence in the case, but under date of April 17, 1895, he was advised by Captain Campion (also an officer of the French Navy) that “it was impossible for him to furnish him (the consul) with this document, as the whole record of the case had been sent to France.”

I append on the overleaf a copy of a telegram which was sent to yon on the 8th instant, on receipt of your dispatch No. 327, of the 27th ultimo.

I am, etc.,

Alvey A. Adee,
Acting Secretary
.