From Viscount Grey of Fallodon

     Rosehall Post Office,

     Sutherland,

     April 8, 1917.

     DEAR MR. PAGE: 

This is a line that needs no answer to express my congratulations on President Wilson’s address.  I can’t express adequately all that I feel.  Great gratitude and great hope are in my heart.  I hope now that some great and abiding good to the world will yet be wrought out of all this welter of evil.  Recent events in Russia, too, stimulate this hope:  they are a good in themselves, but not the power for good in this war that a great and firmly established free country like the United States can be.  The President’s address and the way it has been followed up in your country is a splendid instance of great action finely inspired.  I glow with admiration.

     Yours sincerely,

     GREY OF FALLODON

One Englishman who was especially touched by the action of the United States was His Majesty the King.  Few men had watched the course of America during the war with more intelligent interest than the head of the British royal house.  Page had had many interviews with King George at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor, and his notes contain many appreciative remarks on the King’s high character and conscientious devotion to his duties.  That Page in general did not believe in kings and emperors as institutions his letters reveal; yet even so profound a Republican as he recognized sterling character, whether in a crowned head or in a humble citizen, and he had seen enough of King George to respect him.  Moreover, the peculiar limitations of the British monarchy certainly gave it an unusual position and even saved it from much of the criticism that was fairly lavished upon such nations as Germany and Austria.  Page especially admired King George’s frankness in recognizing these limitations and his readiness to accommodate himself to the British Constitution.  On most occasions, when these two men met, their intercourse was certainly friendly or at least not formidable.  After all formalities had been exchanged, the King would frequently draw the Ambassador aside; the two would retire to the smoking room, and there, over their cigars, discuss a variety of matters—­submarines, international politics, the Irish question and the like.  His Majesty was not averse even to bringing up the advantages of the democratic and the monarchical system.  The King and Ambassador would chat, as Page himself would say, like “two human beings”; King George is an emphatic and vivacious talker, fond of emphasizing his remarks by pounding the table; he has the liveliest sense of humour, and enjoys nothing quite so much as a good story.  Page found that, on the subject of the Germans, the King entertained especially robust views.  “They are my kinsmen,” he would say, “but I am ashamed of them.”