Meantime I hardly need tell you of my appreciation of such a chance to make so interesting a study and to enjoy so greatly the most interesting experience, I really believe, in the whole world.  I only hope that in time I may see how to shape the constant progression of incidents into a constructive course of events; for we are soon coming into a time of big changes.

     Most heartily yours,
     WALTER H. PAGE.

     To David F. Houston[28]
     American Embassy, London [undated].

     DEAR HOUSTON: 

You’re doing the bigger job:  as the world now is, there is no other job so big as yours or so well worth doing; but I’m having more fun.  I’m having more fun than anybody else anywhere.  It’s a large window you look through on the big world—­here in London; and, while I am for the moment missing many of the things that I’ve most cared about hitherto (such as working for the countryman, guessing at American public opinion, coffee that’s fit to drink, corn bread, sunshine, and old faces) big new things come on the horizon.  Yet a man’s personal experiences are nothing in comparison with the large job that our Government has to do in its Foreign Relations.  I’m beginning to begin to see what it is.  The American people are taken most seriously here.  I’m sometimes almost afraid of the respect and even awe in which they hold us.  But the American Government is a mere joke to them.  They don’t even believe that we ourselves believe in it.  We’ve had no foreign policy, no continuity of plan, no matured scheme, no settled way of doing things and we seem afraid of Irishmen or Germans or some “element” when a chance for real action comes.  I’m writing to the President about this and telling him stories to show how it works.

We needn’t talk any longer about keeping aloof.  If Cecil Spring Rice would tell you the complaints he has already presented and if you saw the work that goes on here—­more than in all the other posts in Europe—­you’d see that all the old talk about keeping aloof is Missouri buncombe.  We’re very much “in,” but not frankly in.

I wish you’d keep your eye on these things in cabinet meetings.  The English and the whole English world are ours, if we have the courtesy to take them—­fleet and trade and all; and we go on pretending we are afraid of “entangling alliances.”  What about disentangling alliances?

We’re in the game.  There’s no use in letting a few wild Irish or cocky Germans scare us.  We need courtesy and frankness, and the destinies of the world will be in our hands.  They’ll fall there anyhow after we are dead; but I wish to see them come, while my own eyes last.  Don’t you?

     Heartily yours,

     W.H.P.

     To Robert N. Page[29]

     London, December 22, 1913.

     MY DEAR BOB: