saying the Embassy was renewing efforts to locate
Cummings--apparently still ignorant even of the place of his
confinement.

After such painful and baffling experiences, I turn to
you--burdened though I know you to be, in this world crisis, with
the weightiest task ever laid upon any man.

But I have another reason for asking this favor. I do not speak
for my son alone; or for him and his friend alone. My son has a
mother--as brave and patriotic as any mother who ever dedicated
an only son to a great cause. The mothers of our boys in France
have rights as well as the boys themselves. My boy's mother had a
right to be protected from the weeks of horrible anxiety and
suspense caused by the inexplicable arrest and imprisonment of
her son. My boy's mother had a right to be spared the supreme
agony caused by a blundering cable from Paris saying that he had
been drowned by a submarine. (An error which Mr. Norton
subsequently cabled that he had discovered six weeks before.) My
boy's mother and all American mothers have a right to be
protected against all needless anxiety and sorrow.

Pardon me, Mr. President, but if I were President and your son
were suffering such prolonged injustice at the hands of France;
and your son's mother had been needlessly kept in Hell as many
weeks as my boy's mother has--I would do something to make
American citizenship as sacred in the eyes of Frenchmen as Roman
citizenship was in the eyes of the ancient world. Then it was
enough to ask the question, "Is it lawful to scourge a man that
is a Roman, and uncondemned?" Now, in France, it seems lawful to