IV

This letter discloses that Page was pinning his faith in President Wilson, and that he still had confidence in the President’s determination to uphold the national honour.  Page was not one of those who thought that the United States should declare war immediately after the Lusitania.  The President’s course, in giving Germany a chance to make amends, and to disavow the act, met with his approval, and he found, also, much to admire in Mr. Wilson’s first Lusitania note.  His judgment in this matter was based first of all upon the merits of the case; besides this, his admiration for Mr. Wilson as a public man was strong.  To think otherwise of the President would have been a great grief to the Ambassador and to differ with his chief on the tremendous issue of the war would have meant for Page the severance of one of the most cherished associations of his life.  The interest which he had shown in advocating Wilson’s presidential candidacy has already been set forth; and many phases of the Wilson administration had aroused his admiration.  The President’s handling of domestic problems Page regarded as a masterpiece in reconciling statesmanship with practical politics, and his energetic attitude on the Panama Tolls had introduced new standards into American foreign relations.  Page could not sympathize with all the details of the Wilsonian Mexican policy, yet he saw in it a high-minded purpose and a genuine humanitarianism.  But the outbreak of war presented new aspects of Mr. Wilson’s mind.  The President’s attitude toward the European struggle, his conception of “neutrality,” and his failure to grasp the meaning of the conflict, seemed to Page to show a lack of fundamental statesmanship; still his faith in Wilson was deep-seated, and he did not abandon hope that the President could be brought to see things as they really were.  Page even believed that he might be instrumental in his conversion.

But in the summer and autumn of 1915 one agony followed another.  The “too proud to fight” speech was in Page’s mind nothing less than a tragedy.  The president’s first Lusitania note for a time restored the Ambassador’s confidence; it seemed to show that the President intended to hold Germany to that “strict accountability” which he had threatened.  But Mr. Wilson’s course now presented new difficulties to his Ambassador.  Still Page believed that the President, in his own way and in his own time, would find a path out of his dilemma that would protect the honour and the safety of the United States.  If any of the Embassy subordinates became impatient over the procedure of Washington, he did not find a sympathetic listener in the Ambassador.  The whole of London and of Europe might be resounding with denunciations of the White House, but Page would tolerate no manifestations of hostility in his presence.  “The problem appears different to Washington than it does to us,”