To the President
     London, May 4, 1917.

     DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: 

...  It is a remarkable commentary on the insularity of the British and on our studied isolation that till Mr. Balfour went over not a member of this Government had ever met a member of our Administration!  Quite half our misunderstandings were due to this.  If I had the making of the laws of the two governments, I’d have a statutory requirement that at least one visit a year by high official persons should be made either way.  We should never have had a blacklist, etc., if that had been done.  When I tried the quite humble task of getting Polk to come and the excuse was made that he couldn’t be spared from his desk—­Mr. President, I fear we haven’t half enough responsible official persons in our Government.  I should say that no man even of Polk’s rank ought to have a desk:  just as well give him a mill-stone.  Even I try not to have a desk:  else I’d never get anything of importance done; for I find that talks and conferences in my office and in the government offices and wherever else I can find out things take all my waking hours.  The Foreign Office here has about five high position men to every one in the State Department.  God sparing me, I’m going one of these days to prepare a paper for our Foreign Affairs Committee on the Waste of Having too Few High Grade Men in the Department of State; a Plea for Five Assistant Secretaries for Every One Now Existing and for Provision for International Visits by Them.

     Here’s an ancient and mouldy precedent that needs shattering—­for
     the coming of our country into its proper station and influence in
     the world.

I am sure that Mr. Balfour’s visit has turned out as well as I hoped, and my hopes were high.  He is one of the most interesting men that I’ve ever had the honour to know intimately—­he and Lord Grey.  Mr. Balfour is a Tory, of course; and in general I don’t like Tories, yet liberal he surely is—­a sort of high-toned Scotch democrat.  I have studied him with increasing charm and interest.  Not infrequently when I am in his office just before luncheon he says, “Come, walk over and we’ll have lunch with the family.”  He’s a bachelor.  One sister lives with him.  Another (Lady Rayleigh, the wife of the great chemist and Chancellor of Cambridge University) frequently visits him.  Either of those ladies could rule this Empire.  Then there are nieces and cousins always about—­people of rare cultivation, every one of ’em.  One of those girls confirmed the story that “Uncle Arthur” one day concluded that the niblick was something more than a humble necessity of a bad golfer—­that it had positive virtues of its own and had suffered centuries of neglect.  He, therefore, proceeded to play with the niblick only, till he proved his case and showed that it is a club entitled to the highest respect.

A fierce old Liberal fighter in Parliamentary