Startling as was the sensation caused by the President’s December note, it was mild compared with that which was now to come.  Page naturally sent prompt reports of all these conversations to the President and likewise kept him completely informed as to the state of public feeling, but his best exertions apparently did not immediately affect the Wilson policy.  The overwhelming fact is that the President’s mind was fixed on a determination to compel the warring powers to make peace and in this way to keep the United States out of the conflict.  Even the disturbance caused by his note of December 18th did not make him pause in this peace campaign.  To that note the British sent a manly and definite reply, drafted by Mr. Balfour, giving in detail precisely the terms upon which the Allies would compose their differences with the Central Powers.  The Germans sent a reply consisting of ten or a dozen lines, which did not give their terms, but merely asked again for a conference.  Events were now moving with the utmost rapidity.  On January 9th, a council of German military chieftains was held at Pless; in this it was decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare.  On January 16th the Zimmermann-Mexico telegram was intercepted; this informed Bernstorff, among other things, that this decision had been made.  On January 16th, at nine o’clock in the morning, the American Embassy in London began receiving a long cipher despatch from Washington.  The preamble announced that the despatch contained a copy of an address which the President proposed to deliver before the Senate “in a few days.”  Page was directed to have copies of the address “secretly prepared” and to hand them to the British Foreign Office and to newspapers of the type of the Nation, the Daily News, and the Manchester Guardian—­all three newspapers well known for their Pacifist tendencies.  As the speech approached its end, this sentence appeared:  “It must be a peace without victory.”  The words greatly puzzled the secretary in charge, for they seemed almost meaningless.  Suspecting that an error had been made in transmission, the secretary directed the code room to cable Washington for a verification of the cipher groups.  Very soon the answer was received; there had been no mistake; the Presidential words were precisely those which had been first received:  “Peace without victory.”  The slips were then taken to Page, who read the document, especially these fateful syllables, with a consternation which he made no effort to conceal.  He immediately wrote a cable to President Wilson, telling him of the deplorable effect this sentence would produce and imploring him to cut it out of his speech—­with what success the world now knows.

An astonishing feature of this episode is that Page had recently explained to the Foreign Office, in obedience to instructions from Washington, that Mr. Wilson’s December note should not be interpreted as placing the Allies and the Central Powers on the same moral level.  Now Mr. Wilson, in this “peace without victory” phrase, had repeated practically the same idea in another form.  On the day the speech was received at the Embassy, about a week before it was delivered in the Senate, Page made the following memorandum: