work.  The fact is that relations between the two countries had not been so harmonious in twenty years.  All causes of possible friction had been adjusted.  The treaty regulating the future of the Bagdad Railroad, the only problem that clouded the future, had been initialled by both the British and the German Foreign Offices and was about to be signed at the moment when the ultimatums began to fly through the air.  Prince Lichnowsky was thus entitled to look upon his ambassadorship as one of the most successful in modern history, for it had removed all possible cause of war.

And then suddenly came the stunning blow.  For several days Lichnowsky’s behaviour was that of an irresponsible person.  Those who came into contact with him found his mind wandering and incoherent.  Page describes the German Ambassador as coming down and receiving him in his pajamas; he was not the only one who had that experience, for members of the British Foreign Office transacted business with this most punctilious of diplomats in a similar condition of personal disarray.  And the dishabille extended to his mental operations as well.

But Lichnowsky’s and Mensdorff’s behaviour merely portrayed the general atmosphere that prevailed in London during that week.  This atmosphere was simply hysterical.  Among all the intimate participants, however, there was one man who kept his poise and who saw things clearly.  That was the American Ambassador.  It was certainly a strange trick which fortune had played upon Page.  He had come to London with no experience in diplomacy.  Though the possibility of such an outbreak as this war had been in every man’s consciousness for a generation, it had always been as something certain yet remote; most men thought of it as most men think of death—­as a fatality which is inevitable, but which is so distant that it never becomes a reality.  Thus Page, when he arrived in London, did not have the faintest idea of the experience that awaited him.  Most people would have thought that his quiet and studious and unworldly life had hardly prepared him to become the representative of the most powerful neutral power at the world’s capital during the greatest crisis of modern history.  To what an extent that impression was justified the happenings of the next four years will disclose; it is enough to point out in this place that in one respect at least the war found the American Ambassador well prepared.  From the instant hostilities began his mind seized the significance of it all.  “Mr. Page had one fine qualification for his post,” a great British statesman once remarked to the present writer.  “From the beginning he saw that there was a right and a wrong to the matter.  He did not believe that Great Britain and Germany were equally to blame.  He believed that Great Britain was right and that Germany was wrong.  I regard it as one of the greatest blessings of modern times that the United States had an ambassador in London in August, 1914, who had grasped this overwhelming fact.  It seems almost like a dispensation of Providence.”