would have grievously failed had he not done his best to keep headquarters informed.  He did not regard it as “loyalty” merely to forward only that kind of material which Washington apparently preferred to obtain; with a frankness which Mr. Wilson’s friends regarded as almost ruthless, Page reported what he believed to be the truth.  That this practice was displeasing to the powers of Washington there is abundant evidence.  In early December, 1914, Colonel House was compelled to transmit a warning to the American Ambassador at London.  “The President wished me to ask you to please be more careful not to express any unneutral feeling, either by word of mouth, or by letter and not even to the State Department.  He said that both Mr. Bryan and Mr. Lansing had remarked upon your leaning in that direction and he thought that it would materially lessen your influence.  He feels very strongly about this.”

Evidently Page did not regard his frank descriptions of England under war as expressing unneutral feeling; at any rate, as the war went on, his letters, even those which he wrote to President Wilson, became more and more outspoken.  Page’s resignation was always at the President’s disposal; the time came, as will appear, when it was offered; so long as he occupied his post, however, nothing could turn him from his determination to make what he regarded as an accurate record of events.  This policy of maintaining an outward impartiality, and, at the same time, of bringing pressure to bear on Washington in behalf of the Allies, he called “waging neutrality.”

Such was the mood in which Page now prepared to play his part in what was probably the greatest diplomatic drama in history.  The materials with which this drama concerned itself were such apparently lifeless subjects as ships and cargoes, learned discourses on such abstract matters as the doctrine of continuous voyage, effective blockade, and conditional contraband; yet the struggle, which lasted for three years, involved the greatest issue of modern times—­nothing less than the survival of those conceptions of liberty, government, and society which make the basis of English-speaking civilization.  To the newspaper reader of war days, shipping difficulties signified little more than a newspaper headline which he hastily read, or a long and involved lawyer’s note which he seldom read at all—­or, if he did, practically never understood.  Yet these minute and neglected controversies presented to the American Nation the greatest decision in its history.  Once before, a century ago, a European struggle had laid before the United States practically the same problem.  Great Britain fought Napoleon, just as it had now been compelled to fight the Hohenzollern, by blockade; such warfare, in the early nineteenth century, led to retaliations, just as did the maritime warfare in the recent conflict, and the United States suffered, in 1812, as in 1914, from what were regarded as the depredations of both