SIR: 

As official head of one of the Powers signatory to the Hague Convention, I feel it to be my privilege and my duty under Article 3 of that Convention to say to your Majesty, in a spirit of most earnest friendship, that I should welcome an opportunity to act in the interest of European peace either now or at any time that might be thought more suitable as an occasion, to serve your Majesty and all concerned in a way that would afford me lasting cause for gratitude and happiness.

     WOODROW WILSON.

This, of course, was not mediation, but a mere expression of the President’s willingness to mediate at any time that such a tender from him, in the opinion of the warring Powers, would serve the cause of peace.  Identically the same message was sent to the American Ambassadors at the capitals of all the belligerent Powers for presentation to the heads of state.  Page’s letter of August 9th, printed above, refers to the earnestness and cordiality with which King George received him and to the freedom with which His Majesty discussed the situation.

In this exciting week Page was thrown into intimate contact with the two most pathetic figures in the diplomatic circle of London—­the Austrian and the German Ambassadors.  To both of these men the war was more than a great personal sorrow:  it was a tragedy.  Mensdorff, the Austrian Ambassador, had long enjoyed an intimacy with the British royal family.  Indeed he was a distant relative of King George, for he was a member of the family of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a fact which was emphasized by his physical resemblance to Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria.  Mensdorff was not a robust man, physically or mentally, and he showed his consternation at the impending war in most unrestrained and even unmanly fashion.  As his government directed him to turn the Austrian Embassy over to the American Ambassador, it was necessary for Page to call and arrange the details.  The interview, as Page’s letter indicates, was little less than a paroxysm of grief on the Austrian’s part.  He denounced Germany and the Kaiser; he paraded up and down the room wringing his hands; he could be pacified only by suggestions from the American that perhaps something might happen to keep Austria out of the war.  The whole atmosphere of the Austrian Embassy radiated this same feeling.  “Austria has no quarrel with England,” remarked one of Mensdorff’s assistants to one of the ladies of the American Embassy; and this sentiment was the general one in Austrian diplomatic circles.  The disinclination of both Great Britain and Austria to war was so great that, as Page relates, for several days there was no official declaration.