have brought all this hullabaloo again about the ears of the Administration.  But the position of France is entirely different; the memories of Lafayette and Rochambeau still exercise a profound spell on the American mind; France does not suffer from the persecution of hyphenate populations, and Americans will stand even outrages from France without getting excited.  Page knew that if the British seized the Dacia, the cry would go up in certain quarters for immediate war, but that, if France committed the same crime, the guns of the adversary would be spiked.  It was purely a case of sentiment and “psychology.”  And so the event proved.  His suggestion was at once acted on; a French cruiser went out into the Channel, seized the offending ship, took it into port, where a French prize court promptly condemned it.  The proceeding did not cause even a ripple of hostility.  The Dacia was sold to Frenchmen, rechristened the Yser and put to work in the Mediterranean trade.  The episode was closed in the latter part of 1915 when a German submarine torpedoed the vessel and sent it to the bottom.

Such was the spirit which Page and Sir Edward Grey brought to the solution of the great shipping problems of 1914-1917.  There is much more to tell of this great task of “waging neutrality,” and it will be told in its proper place.  But already it is apparent to what extent these two men served the great cause of English-speaking civilization.  Neither would quibble or uphold an argument which he thought unjust, even though his nation might gain in a material sense, and neither would pitch the discussion in any other key than forbearance and mutual accommodation and courtliness.  For both men had the same end in view.  They were both thinking, not of the present, but of the coming centuries.  The cooeperation of the two nations in meeting the dangers of autocracy and Prussian barbarism, in laying the foundations of a future in which peace, democracy, and international justice should be the directing ideas of human society—­such was the ultimate purpose at which these two statesmen aimed.  And no men have ever been more splendidly justified by events.  The Anglo-American situation of 1914 contained dangers before which all believers in real progress now shudder.  Had Anglo-American diplomacy been managed with less skill and consideration, the United States and Great Britain would have become involved in a quarrel beside which all their previous differences would have appeared insignificant.  Mutual hatreds and hostilities would have risen that would have prevented the entrance of the United States into the war on the side of the Allies.  It is not inconceivable that the history of 1812 would have been repeated, and that the men and resources of this country might have been used to support purposes which have always been hateful to the American conscience.  That the world was saved from this calamity is owing largely to the fact that Great Britain had in its Foreign