opinions he may have held about his country’s course.  His duty to his post made it just as imperative that he set forth to the President the facts exactly as they were.  And this the Ambassador now proceeded to do.  For the mere ornamental dignities of an Ambassadorship Page cared nothing; he was wasting his health in his duties and exhausting his private resources; much as he loved the English and congenial as were his surroundings, the fear of being recalled for “disloyalty” or insubordination never influenced him.  The letters which he now wrote to Colonel House and to President Wilson himself are probably without parallel in the diplomatic annals of this or of any other country.  In them he told the President precisely what Englishmen thought of him and of the extent to which the United States was suffering in European estimation from the Wilson policy.  His boldness sometimes astounded his associates.  One day a friend and adviser of President Wilson’s came into the Ambassador’s office just as Page had finished one of his communications to Washington.

“Read that!” the Ambassador said, handing over the manuscript to his visitor.

As the caller read, his countenance displayed the progressive stages of his amazement.  When he had finished, his hands dropped helplessly upon his knees.

“Is that the way you write to the President?” he gasped.

“Of course,” Page replied, quietly.  “Why not?  Why shouldn’t I tell him the truth?  That is what I am here for.”

“There is no other person in the world who dare talk to him like that!” was the reply.

This is unquestionably the fact.  That President Wilson did not like people about him whose views were opposed to his own is now no secret, and during the period when his policy was one of the great issues of the world there was probably no one except Page who intruded upon his solitude with ideas that so abruptly disagreed with the opinions of the White House.  The letters which Page wrote Colonel House were intended, of course, for the President himself, and practically all of them Colonel House read aloud to the head of the nation.  The two men would closet themselves in the old cabinet room on the second floor of the White House—­that same room in which Lincoln had met his advisers during Civil War days; and here Colonel House would quietly read the letters in which Page so mercilessly portrayed the situation as it appeared in English and European eyes.  The President listened impassively, giving no sign of approval or disapproval, and hardly, at times, of much interest.  In the earlier days, when Page’s letters consisted of pictures of English life and English men, and colourful descriptions of England under the stress of war, the President was vastly entertained; he would laugh loudly at Page’s wit, express his delight at his graphic and pungent style and feel deeply the horrors of war as his Ambassador unfolded them.  “I always found Page compelling