of my personal loyalty to you and my pride in helping forward the great principles in which we both believe.  But I understood then (and I am sure the subject lay in your mind in the same way) that my service would be for four years at the most.  I made all my arrangements, professional and domestic, on this supposition.  I shall, therefore, be ready to lay down my work here on March 4th or as soon thereafter as meets your pleasure.

I am more than proud of the confidence that you have shown in me.  To it I am indebted for the opportunity I have had to give such public service to my country as I could, as well as for the most profitable experience of my life.  A proper and sympathetic understanding between the two English-speaking worlds seems to me the most important duty of far-seeing men in either country.  It has taken such a profound hold on me that I shall, in whatever way I can, work for its complete realization as long as I can work for anything.

     I am, Mr. President, most faithfully and gratefully yours,

     WALTER H. PAGE.

This letter was written at a time when President Wilson was exerting his best energies to bring about peace.  The Presidential campaign had caused him to postpone these efforts, for he believed that neither Germany nor Great Britain could take seriously the activities of a President whose own political position was insecure.  At the time Page’s letter was received, the President was thinking only of a peace based upon a stalemate; it was then his apparent conviction that both sides to the struggle were about equally in the wrong and that a decisive victory of either would not be a good thing for the world.  Yet it is interesting to compare this letter with the famous speech which the President made six months afterward when he asked Congress to declare the existence of a state of war with Germany.  Practically all the important reasons which Mr. Wilson then advanced for this declaration are found in Page’s letter of the preceding November.  That autocracies are a constant menace to world peace, that the United States owes it to its democratic tradition to take up arms against the enemy of free government, that in doing this, it was not making war upon the German people, but upon its imperialistic masters—­these were the arguments which Page laid before the President in his letter of resignation, and these were the leading ideas in Mr. Wilson’s address of April 2nd.  There are even sentences in Page’s communication which seem to foreshadow Mr. Wilson’s assertion that “The world must be made safe for democracy.”  This letter in itself sufficiently makes it clear that Page’s correspondence, irritating in its later phases as it may have been, strongly influenced Mr. Wilson in his final determination on war.