His behaviour throughout the three succeeding years was entirely consistent with his conception of “neutrality.”  That conception, as is apparent from the letters already printed, was not the Wilsonian conception.  Probably no American diplomat was more aggrieved at the President’s definition of neutrality than his Ambassador to Great Britain.  Page had no quarrel with the original neutrality proclamation; that was purely a routine governmental affair, and at the time it was issued it represented the proper American attitude.  But the President’s famous emendations filled him with astonishment and dismay.  “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action,” said the President on August 19th[90], “we must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a prejudice of one party to the prejudice of another.”  Page was prepared to observe all the traditional rules of neutrality, to insist on American rights with the British Government, and to do full legal justice to the Germans, but he declined to abrogate his conscience where his personal judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict were concerned.  “Neutrality,” he said in a letter to his brother, Mr. Henry A. Page, of Aberdeen, N.C., “is a quality of government—­an artificial unit.  When a war comes a government must go in it or stay out of it.  It must make a declaration to the world of its attitude.  That’s all that neutrality is.  A government can be neutral, but no man can be.”

“The President and the Government,” Page afterward wrote, “in their insistence upon the moral quality of neutrality, missed the larger meaning of the war.  It is at bottom nothing but the effort of the Berlin absolute monarch and his group to impose their will on as large a part of the world as they can overrun.  The President started out with the idea that it was a war brought on by many obscure causes—­economic and the like; and he thus missed its whole meaning.  We have ever since been dealing with the chips which fly from the war machine and have missed the larger meaning of the conflict.  Thus we have failed to render help to the side of Liberalism and Democracy, which are at stake in the world.”

Nor did Page think it his duty, in his private communications to his Government and his friends, to maintain that attitude of moral detachment which Mr. Wilson’s pronouncement had evidently enjoined upon him.  It was not his business to announce his opinions to the world, for he was not the man who determined the policy of the United States; that was the responsibility of the President and his advisers.  But an ambassador did have a certain role to perform.  It was his duty to collect information and impressions, to discover what important people thought of the United States and of its policies, and to send forward all such data to Washington.  According to Page’s theory of the Ambassadorial office, he was a kind of listening post on the front of diplomacy, and he