screen in Sir Edward's room while an Ambassador talks! I wonder if my comments on certain poets, which I have poured forth there to provoke his, are preserved in the archives of the British Empire. The British Empire is surely very welcome to them. I have twice found it useful, by the way, to bring up Wordsworth when he has begun to talk about Panama tolls. Then your friend Canon Rawnsley has, without suspecting it, done good service in diplomacy.

The newspaper men here, by the way, both English and American, are disposed to treat us fairly and to be helpful. The London Times on most subjects, is very friendly, and I find its editors worth cultivating for their own sakes and because of their position. It is still the greatest English newspaper. Its general friendliness to the United States, by the way, has started a rumor that I hear once in a while that it is really owned by Americans-nonsense yet awhile. To the fairness and helpfulness of the newspaper men there are one or two exceptions. One of them went to the Navy

League dinner last night at which I made a little speech. When I sat down, he remarked to his neighbor, with a yawn, "Well, nothing in it for me. The Ambassador, I am afraid, said nothing for which I can demand his recall." They, of course, don't care thripence about me; it's you they hope to annoy.

Then after beating them at their own game of daily little courtesies, we want a fight with them-a good stiff fight about something wherein we are dead right, to remind them sharply that we have sand in our craw." I pray every night for such a fight; for they like fighting men. Then they'll respect our Government as they already respect us-if we are dead right.

*

But I've little hope for a fight of the right kind with Sir Edward Grey. He is the very reverse of insolent-fair, frank, sympathetic, and he has so clear an understanding of our real character that he'd yield anything that his party and Parliament would permit. He'd make a good American with the use of very

*It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the Ambassador was thinking only of a diplomatic "fight."

little sandpaper. Of course I know him better than I know any other member of the Cabinet, but he seems to me the best-balanced man of them all.

I can assure you emphatically that the tariff act* does command their respect and is already having an amazing influence on their opinion of our Government. Lord Mersey, a distinguished law lord and a fine old fellow of the very best type of Englishman, said to me last Sunday, "I wish to thank you for stopping half-way in reducing your tariff: that will only half ruin us." A lady of a political family (Liberal) next whom I sat at dinner the other night (and these women know their politics as no class of women among us do) said: "Tell me something about your great President. We hadn't heard much about him nor felt his hand till your tariff bill passed. He seems to have real power in the Government. You know we do not always know who has power in your Government." Lord Grey, the one-time Governor-General of Canada, stopped looking at the royal wedding presents the other evening long enough to say: "The United States Government is waking up waking up."

I sum up these atmospheric conditions-I do not presume to call them by so definite a name as recommendations:

We are in the international game-not in its Old World intrigues and burdens and sorrows

*The Underwood Bill revising the tariff "downward" became a law October, 1913. It was one of the first important measures of the new Wilson Administration.

and melancholy, but in the inevitable way to leadership and to cheerful mastery in the future; and everybody knows that we are in it but us. It is a sheer blind habit that causes us to continue to try to think of ourselves as aloof. They think in terms of races here, and we are of their race, and we shall become the strongest and the happiest branch of it.

While we play the game with them, we shall play it better by playing it under their longwrought-out rules of courtesy in every-day

affairs.

We shall play it better, too, if our Government play it quietly-except when the subject demands publicity. I have heard that in past years the foreign representatives of our Government have reported much too few things and much too meagerly. I have heard since I have been here that these representatives become timid because Washington has for many a year conducted its foreign business too much in the newspapers; and the foreign governments themselves are always afraid of this.

Meantime I hardly need tell you of my appreciation of such a chance to make so interesting a study and to enjoy so greatly the most interesting experience, I really believe, in the whole world. I only hope that in time I may see how to shape the constant progression of incidents into a constructive course of events; for we are soon coming into a time of big changes.

Most heartily yours,
WALTER H. PAGE.

C

ONSCIENCE doth make cowards of us all." Not mine-mine made me a politician. At fifty-five years of age, rich in money and experience, and recently released from the toils of materialism, it ceaselessly confronted me with my duty to pay back, in the form of public service, the overdraft which I had been permitted to make upon the opportunities of the country. Repayment in money alone would not suffice: I was financially prosperous and rich in experience. Money could be repaid by my executors, but experience I must repay myself and now or never.

My friends did not know this, and hence it was a great surprise to them when, in 1912, I suddenly entered politics, and threw myself heart and soul into the enterprise of securing the Presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson. "Why," they asked me, "should a man like yourself, whose whole active life has been spent in the thick of the battle for wealth, embark on the untried sea of politics? And, why, if you are determined to take the risks of this experiment, do you choose so forlorn a hope, as the cause of the least likely of all the candidates, for the nomination of the party that has elected only one President since the Civil War?"

The answer was as simple to me as it was strange to them. My life had been an intense struggle between idealism and materialism. In youth I had burned with an enthusiasm for the ideal, which had fed alike upon the teachings of the Reverend Dr. Einhorn in my boyhood, the inspiring association which I had enjoyed with a saintly Quaker doctor in New York, the noble messages to which I had listened from Christian ministers, and the austere and lofty ethical philosophy of Dr. Felix Adler. In my youth I had resolved to devote my life to

idealistic enterprises: I had even joined a group of disciples of Dr. Adler known as the "Union for Higher Life," which was pledged, not only to an evangelical spreading of his system of ethical culture, but also to practical works of philanthropy and human betterment.

In early manhood, however, the temptation of materialism had beset me in a familiar form. My early marriage had been followed by a financial disappointment; and I was pelled to devote more time than I had expected to providing for my family. My intention was to make their future modestly secure, and then to resume my idealistic avocation. I soon found, however, that I had a special gift for making money. By the time I had secured the competence which had been my ambition, I had become fascinated with money-making as a game. Before I realized it, I was immersed in a dozen enterprises, was obligated to a hundred business friends, and, like all my associates in the business world, was going headlong in the chase for wealth.

Fortunately, in 1905, the prospect of disaster brought me to my senses. I foresaw the panic of 1907; and, while others all around me plunged onward toward the brink, I paused and took stock of my future. I began to sever my financial connections. This process of slowing down my business pace gave me time for other introspection; and I realized, with astonishment and dismay, how far the swift tide of business had swept me from the course I had charted for my life in youth. I was ashamed to realize that I had neglected the nobler path of duty. I resolved to retire wholly from active business, and to devote the rest of my life to making good the better resolutions of my boyhood.

It took me some years to divest myself of my business obligations on the one hand, and,

on the other, to find a practical field for social service. During this period, in which I was "finding myself," I was attracted to the career of Woodrow Wilson. I admired the courage with which he was fighting the battle of democracy at Princeton. And, in the early months of 1911, I was even more delighted to watch his progress as Governor of New Jersey: the splendid fight he was making there to overthrow the rule of the bosses, and to write into the statutes of the state those seven measures of practical reform which his enemies derisively dubbed the "Seven Sisters."

"Here," I said to myself, "is a man who does not merely preach political righteousness; here is a practical reformer. This man has Roosevelt's gift for the dramatic diagnosis of political diseases; he has Bryan's moral enthusiasm for political righteousness. But he has other qualities which these men lack: these are, the constructive faculty, the imagination to devise remedies, the courage to apply them, and the gift of leadership to put them into effective action." I wished to know more of this new and promising char

acter. I resolved to find an occasion for meeting him.

Such an opportunity came a few weeks later. As president of the Free Synagogue in New York City, I invited Governor Wilson to be a guest of honor at the dinner in celebration of the fourth anniversary of its foundation. As I presided at the dinner, and as the Governor was seated at my right, it gave me a chance to get acquainted. I found in him at once a congenial spirit, and in that one intense conversation I got more from him than I could have gotten from half a dozen casual meetings.

On my left was the other guest of honor, Senator Borah of Idaho. He and Wilson proved instantly antagonistic. The air was electrical with the clash of their dissimilar temperaments. How startled I would have been, that evening, could I have realized that this discordance of their natures, of which I was at that moment acutely conscious, had in it the seeds of a future battle-an epic struggle, with the White House and the Capitol for its headquarters; the world for its audience; and the destiny of the nations, following the