. . . Couldn’t the business with Great Britain be put into Moore’s[48] hands?  It is surely important enough at times to warrant separate attention—­or (I might say) attention.  You know, after eight or nine months of this sort of thing, the feeling grows on us all here that perhaps many of our telegrams and letters may not be read by anybody at all.  You begin to feel that they may not be deciphered or even opened.  Then comes the feeling (for a moment), why send any more?  Why do anything but answer such questions as come now and then?  Corresponding with Nobody—­can you imagine how that feels?—­What the devil do you suppose does become of the letters and telegrams that I send, from which and about which I never hear a word?  As a mere matter of curiosity I should like to know who receives them and what he does with them!

I’ve a great mind some day to send a despatch saying that an earthquake has swallowed up the Thames, that a suffragette has kissed the King, and that the statue of Cromwell has made an assault on the House of Lords—­just to see if anybody deciphers it.

Alter the Civil War an old fellow in Virginia was tired of the world.  He’d have no more to do with it.  He cut a slit in a box in his house and nailed up the box.  Whenever a letter came for him, he’d read the postmark and say “Baltimore—­Baltimore—­there isn’t anybody in Baltimore that I care to hear from.”  Then he’d drop the letter unopened through the slit into the box.  “Philadelphia?  I have no friend in Philadelphia”—­into the box, unopened.  When he died, the big box was nearly full of unopened letters.  When I get to Washington again, I’m going to look for a big box that must now be nearly full of my unopened letters and telegrams.

     W.H.P.

The real reason why the Ambassador wished to remain in London was to assist in undoing a great wrong which the United States had done itself and the world.  Page was attempting to perform his part in introducing new standards into diplomacy.  His discussions of Mexico had taken the form of that “idealism” which he was apparently having some difficulty in persuading British statesmen and the British public to accept.  He was doing his best to help bring about that day when, in Gladstone’s famous words, “the idea of public right would be the governing idea” of international relations.  But while the American Ambassador was preaching this new conception, the position of his own country on one important matter was a constant impediment to his efforts.  Page was continually confronted by the fact that the United States, high-minded as its foreign policy might pretend to be, was far from “idealistic” in the observance of the treaty that it had made with Great Britain concerning the Panama Canal.  There was a certain embarrassment involved in preaching unselfishness in Mexico and Central America at a time when the United States was practising selfishness and dishonesty in Panama.  For, in the opinion of the Ambassador and that of most other dispassionate students of the Panama treaty, the American policy on Panama tolls amounted to nothing less.