[Illustration:  The Rt.  Hon. David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1908-1915, Minister of Munitions, 1915-1916, Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1916-1922]

[Illustration:  The Rt.  Hon. Arthur James Balfour (now the Earl of Balfour) Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1916-1919]

The Ambassador’s mail likewise underwent a complete transformation.  His correspondence of the preceding two years, enormous in its extent, had contained much that would have disturbed a man who could easily get excited over trifles, but this aspect of his work never caused Page the slightest unhappiness.  Almost every crank in England who disliked the American policy had seemed to feel it his duty to express his opinions to the American Ambassador.  These letters, at times sorrowful, at others abusive, even occasionally threatening, varying in their style from cultivated English to the grossest illiteracy, now written in red ink to emphasize their bitterness, now printed in large block letters to preserve their anonymity, aroused in Page only a temporary amusement.  But the letters that began to pour in upon him after our Declaration, many of them from the highest placed men and women in the Kingdom, brought out more vividly than anything else the changed position of his country.  Sonnets and verses rained upon the Embassy, most of them pretty bad as poetry, but all of them commendable for their admiring and friendly spirit.  Of all these letters those that came from the steadfast friends of America perhaps gave Page the greatest satisfaction.  “You will have been pleased at the universal tribute paid to the spirit as well as to the lofty and impressive terms of the President’s speech,” wrote Lord Bryce.  “Nothing finer in our time, few things so fine.”  But probably the letter which gave Page the greatest pleasure was that which came from the statesman whose courtesy and broad outlook had eased the Ambassador’s task in the old neutrality days.  In 1916, Sir Edward Grey—­now become Viscount Grey of Fallodon—­had resigned office, forced out, Page says in one of his letters, mainly because he had refused to push the blockade to a point where it might produce a break with the United States.  He had spent the larger part of the time since that event at his country place in Northumberland, along the streams and the forests which had always given him his greatest pleasure, attempting to recover something of the health that he had lost in the ten years which he had spent as head of the British Foreign Office and bearing with characteristic cheerfulness and fortitude the tragedy of a gradually failing eyesight.  The American Declaration of War now came to Lord Grey as the complete justification of his policy.  The mainspring of that policy, as already explained, had been a determination to keep the friendship of the United States, and so shape events that the support of this country would ultimately be cast on the side of the Allies.  And now the great occasion for which he had prepared had come, and in Grey’s mind this signified more than a help to England in soldiers and ships; it meant bringing together the two branches of a common race for the promotion of common ideals.