wherein we are dead right, to remind them sharply that we have sand in our craw[26].  I pray every night for such a fight; for they like fighting men.  Then they’ll respect our Government as they already respect us—­if we are dead right.

But I’ve little hope for a fight of the right kind with Sir Edward Grey.  He is the very reverse of insolent—­fair, frank, sympathetic, and he has so clear an understanding of our real character that he’d yield anything that his party and Parliament would permit.  He’d make a good American with the use of very little sandpaper.  Of course I know him better than I know any other member of the Cabinet, but he seems to me the best-balanced man of them all.

I can assure you emphatically that the tariff act[27] does command their respect and is already having an amazing influence on their opinion of our Government.  Lord Mersey, a distinguished law lord and a fine old fellow of the very best type of Englishman, said to me last Sunday, “I wish to thank you for stopping half-way in reducing your tariff; that will only half ruin us.”  A lady of a political family (Liberal) next whom I sat at dinner the other night (and these women know their politics as no class of women among us do) said:  “Tell me something about your great President.  We hadn’t heard much about him nor felt his hand till your tariff bill passed.  He seems to have real power in the Government.  You know we do not always know who has power in your Government.”  Lord Grey, the one-time Governor-General of Canada, stopped looking at the royal wedding presents the other evening long enough to say:  “The United States Government is waking up—­waking up.”

     I sum up these atmospheric conditions—­I do not presume to call
     them by so definite a name as recommendations: 

We are in the international game—­not in its Old World intrigues and burdens and sorrows and melancholy, but in the inevitable way to leadership and to cheerful mastery in the future; and everybody knows that we are in it but us.  It is a sheer blind habit that causes us to continue to try to think of ourselves as aloof.  They think in terms of races here, and we are of their race, and we shall become the strongest and the happiest branch of it.

     While we play the game with them, we shall play it better by
     playing it under their long-wrought-out rules of courtesy in
     everyday affairs.

We shall play it better, too, if our Government play it quietly—­except when the subject demands publicity.  I have heard that in past years the foreign representatives of our Government have reported too few things and much too meagrely.  I have heard since I have been here that these representatives become timid because Washington has for many a year conducted its foreign business too much in the newspapers; and the foreign governments themselves are always afraid of this.