May there not come such a chance in Mexico—­to clean out bandits, yellow fever, malaria, hookworm—­all to make the country healthful, safe for life and investment, and for orderly self-government at last?  What we did in Cuba might thus be made the beginning of a new epoch in history—­conquest for the sole benefit of the conquered, worked out by a sanitary reformation.  The new sanitation will reclaim all tropical lands; but the work must be first done by military power—­probably from the outside.

     May not the existing military power of Europe conceivably be
     diverted, gradually, to this use?  One step at a time, as political
     and financial occasions arise?  As presently in Mexico?

This present order must change.  It holds the Old World still.  It keeps all parts of the world apart, in spite of the friendly cohesive forces of trade and travel.  It keeps back self-government and the progress of man.

     And the tropics cry out for sanitation, which is at first an
     essentially military task.

A strange idea this may have seemed in August, 1913, a year before the outbreak of the European war; yet the scheme is not dissimilar to the “mandatory” principle, adopted by the Versailles Peace Conference as the only practical method of dealing with backward peoples.  In this work, as in everything that would help mankind on its weary way to a more efficient and more democratic civilization, Page regarded the United States, Great Britain, and the British Dominions as inevitable partners.  Anything that would bring these two nations into a closer cooeperation he looked upon as a step making for human advancement.  He believed that any opportunity of sweeping away misconceptions and prejudices and of impressing upon the two peoples their common mission should be eagerly seized by the statesmen of the two countries.  And circumstances at this particular moment, Page believed, presented a large opportunity of this kind.  It is one of the minor ironies of modern history that the United States and Great Britain should have selected 1914 as a year for a great peace celebration.  That year marked the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, and in 1913 comprehensive plans had already been formed for observing this impressive centennial.  The plan was to make it more than the mere observance of a hundred years of peaceful intercourse; it was the intention to use the occasion to emphasize the fundamental identity of American and British ideals and to lay the foundation of a permanent understanding and friendship.  The erection of a monument to Abraham Lincoln at Westminster—­a plan that has since been realized—­was one detail of this programme.  Another was the restoration of Sulgrave Manor, the English country seat of the Washingtons, and its preservation as a place where the peoples of both countries could share their common