I have your letters of the twenty-second and twenty-fourth of February and I thank you for them most warmly. Happily, things are clearing up a little in the matters which have embarrassed our relations with Great Britain, and I hope that the temper of public opinion is in fact changing there, as it seems to us from this distance to be changing.

Your letters are a lamp to my feet. I feel as I read that their analysis is searching and true.

Things over here go on a tolerably even keel. The prospect at this moment for the repeal of the tolls exemption is very good indeed. I am beginning to feel a considerable degree of confidence that the repeal will go through, and the Press of the country is certainly standing by me in great shape.

My thoughts turn to you very often with gratitude and affectionate regard. If there is ever at any time anything specific you want to learn, pray do not hesitate to ask it of me directly, if you think best.

Carden was here the other day and I spent an hour with him, but I got not even a glimpse

of his mind. I showed him all of mine that he cared to see.

With warmest regards from us all,
Faithfully yours,

WOODROW WILSON.

The debate which now took place in Congress proved to be one of the stormiest in the history of that body. The proceeding did not prove to be the easy victory which the Administration had evidently expected. The struggle was protracted for three months; and it signalized Mr. Wilson's first serious conflict with the Senate-that same Senate which was destined to play such a vexatious and destructive rôle in his career. At this time, however, Mr. Wilson had reached the zenith of his control over the law-making bodies. It was early in his Presidential term, and in these early days Senators are likely to be careful about quarreling with the White House especially the Senators who are members of the President's political party. In this struggle, moreover, Mr. Wilson had the intelligence and the character of the Senate largely on his side, though, strangely enough, his strongest supporters were Republicans and his bitterest opponents were Democrats. Senator Root, Senator Burton, Senator Lodge, Senator Kenyon, Senator McCumber, all Republicans, day after day and week after week upheld the national honor; while Senators O'Gorman, Chamberlain, Vardaman, and Reed, all members of the President's party, just as persistently led the fight for the baser cause. The debate inspired an outburst of Anglophobia which was most distressing to the best friends of the United States and Great Britain. The American press, as a whole, honored itself by championing the President, but certain newspapers made the debate an occasion for unrestrained abuse of Great Britain, and of any one who believed that the United States should treat that nation honestly. The Hearst organs, in cartoon and editorial page, shrieked against the "ancient enemy." All the well-known episodes and characters in American history-Lexington, Bunker Hill, John Paul Jones, Washington, and Franklin-were paraded as arguments against the repeal of an illegal discrimination. Petitions from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish societies were showered upon Congress-in almost unending procession they clogged the pages of the Congressional Record;

public meetings were held in New York and elsewhere denouncing an administration that disgraced the country by "truckling" to Great Britain. The President was accused of seeking an Anglo-American Alliance and of sacrificing American shipping to the glory of British trade; while the history of our diplomatic relations was surveyed in detail for the purpose of proving that Great Britain had broken every treaty she had ever made. In the midst of this deafening hubbub the quiet voice of Senator McCumber-"we are too big in national power to be too little in national integrity"-and that of Senator Root, demolishing one after another the pettifogging arguments of the exemptionists, demonstrated that, after all, the spirit and the eloquence that had given the Senate its great fame were still influential forces in that body.

In all this excitement, Page himself came in for his share of hard knocks. Irish meetings "resolved" against the Ambassador as a statesman who "looks on English claims as superior to American rights," and demanded that President Wilson recall him. It has been the fate of practically every American ambassador to Great Britain to be accused of Anglomania. Lowell, John Hay, and Joseph H. Choate fell under the ban of those elements in American life who seem to think that the main duty of an American diplomat in Great Britain is to insult the country of which he has become the guest. In 1895 the House of Representatives solemnly passed a resolution censuring Ambassador Thomas F. Bayard for a few sentiments friendly to Great Britain which he had uttered at a public banquet. That Page That Page was no undiscriminating idolater of Great Britain these letters have abundantly revealed. That he had the profoundest respect for the British character and British institutions has been made just as clear. With Page this was no sudden enthusiasm; it was the result of the life-time which he had given to studying English literature, English history, and the lives of English public men. The conviction that British conceptions of liberty and government and British ideals of life represented the fine flower of human progress was one which he felt deeply. The fact that these fundamentals had had the opportunity of even freer development in America he regarded as most fortunate both for the United States and for the world. He had never concealed his belief that the

destinies of mankind depended more upon the friendly coöperation of the United States and Great Britain than upon any other single influence. He had preached this in public addresses, and in his writings for twenty-five years preceding his mission to Great Britain. But the mere fact that he should hold such convictions and presume to express them as American Ambassador apparently outraged those same elements in this country who railed against Great Britain in this Panama Tolls debate.

On August 16, 1913, the City of Southampton, England, dedicated a monument in honor of the Mayflower Pilgrims-Southampton having been their original point of departure for Massachusetts. Quite appropriately the city invited the American Ambassador to deliver an address on this occasion; and quite appropriately the Ambassador acknowledged the debt which Americans of to-day owed to the England which had sent these adventurers to lay the foundations of new communities on foreign soil. Yet certain historic truths embodied in this very beautiful and eloquent address aroused considerable anger in certain parts of the United States. parts of the United States. "Blood," said the Ambassador, "carries with it that particular trick of thought, which makes us all English in the last resort. And Puritan and Pilgrim and Cavalier, different yet, are yet one in that they are English still. And thus, despite the fusion of races and of the great contributions of other nations to her 100 millions of people and to her incalculable wealth, the United States is yet English-led and English-ruled." This was merely a way of phrasing a great historic truth-that overwhelmingly the largest element in the American population is British in origin1; that such vital things as its speech and its literature are English; and that our political institutions, our liberty, our law, our conceptions of morality and of life are similarly derived from the British Isles. Page applied the word "English" to Americans in the same sense in which that word is used by John Richard Green, when he traces the history of the English race from a German forest to the Mississippi Valley and the wilds

1This is the fact that is too frequently lost sight of in current discussions of the melting pot. In the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1920, Mr. William S. Rossiter, for many years chief clerk of the United States Census and a statistician of high standing, shows that, of the 95,000,000 white people of the United States, 55,000,000 trace their origin to England, Scotland, and Wales.

of Australia. But the anti-British elements on this side of the water, taking "English-led and English-ruled" out of its context misinterpreted the phrase as meaning that the American Ambassador had approvingly called attention to the fact that the United States was at present under the political control of Great Britain! Senator Chamberlain of Oregon presented a petition from the Staatsverband Deutschsprechender Vereine von Oregon, demanding the Ambassador's removal,

while the Irish-American press and politicians became extremely vocal.

The

Animated as was this outburst, it was mild compared with the excitement caused by a speech which Page made while the Panama debate was raging in Congress. At a dinner of the Associated Chambers of Commerce, in early March, the Ambassador made a few impromptu remarks. occasion was one of good fellowship and good humor, and Page, under the inspiration of the occasion, indulged in a few half-serious, halfjocular references to the Panama Canal and British-American goodfeeling, which, when inaccurately reported, caused a great disturbance in the England-baiting press. "I would not say that we constructed the Panama Canal even for you," he said, "for

Mobile speech on that subject, but in which Mr. Page used the expression, "we prefer that European Powers shall acquire no more territory on this continent," alarmed those precisians in language, who pretended to believe that the Ambassador had used the word "prefer" in its literal sense, and interpreted the sentence

I am speaking with great frankness and not with diplomatic indirection. We built it for reasons of our own. But I will say that it adds to the pleasure of that great work that you will profit by it. You will profit most by it, for you have the greatest carrying trade." A few paragraphs on the Monroe Doctrine which practically repeated President Wilson's

to mean that, while the United States would "prefer" that Europe should not overrun North and South America, it would really raise no serious objection if it did so. Senator Chamberlain of Oregon, who by this time had apparently become the Senatorial leader of the anti-Page propaganda, introduced a resolution demanding that the Ambassador furnish the Senate a complete copy of this. highly pro-British out-. giving. The copy was furnished forthwith-. and with that the tempest subsided.

Mr. Page to the President American Embassy, London,

March 18, 1914.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: About this infernal racket in the Senate over my poor speech, I have telegraphed you all there is to say. Of course, it was a harmless courtesy-no bowing low to the British or any such thing as it was spoken and heard. Of course, too, nothing would have been said. about it but for the controversy over the Canal tolls. That was my mistake-in being betrayed by the friendly dinner and the high compliments paid to us into mentioning a subject under controversy.**

I am greatly distressed lest possibly it may embarrass you. I do hope not.

I think I have now learned that lesson pretty

JOHN HAY

thoroughly. These Anglophobiacs-Irish and Panama-hound me wherever I go. I think I told you of one of their correspondents, who one night got up and yawned at a public dinner as soon as I had spoken and said to his neighbors: "Well, I'll go, the Ambassador didn't say anything that I can get him into trouble about."

I shall, hereafter, write out my speeches and have them gone over carefully by my little Cabinet of Secretaries. Yet something (perhaps not much) will be lost. For these people are infinitely kind and friendly and courteous.

They cannot be driven by anybody to do anything, but they can be led by us to do anything by the use of spontaneous courtesy. It is by spontaneous courtesy that I have achieved whatever I have achieved, and it is for this that those like me who do like me. Of course, what some of the American newspapers have said is true -that I am too free and too untrained

to be a great Ambassador. But the conventional type of Ambassador would not be worth his salt to represent the United States here now, when they are eager to work with us for the peace of the world, if they are convinced of our honor and right-mindedness and the genuineness of our friendship.

I talked this over with Sir Edward Grey the other day, and after telling me that I need fear no trouble at this end of the line, he told me how severely he is now criticised by a "certain element" for "bowing too low to the Americans." We then each bowed low to the other. The yellow press and Chamberlain