warfare, who entered politics about the time Mr. Balfour did, told me this story the other day.  “I’ve watched Balfour for about forty years as a cat watches a rat.  I hate his party.  I hated him till I learned better, for I hated that whole Salisbury crowd.  They wanted to Cecil everything.  But I’ll tell you, Sir, apropos of his visit to your country, that in all those years he has never spoken of the United States except with high respect and often with deep affection.  I should have caught him, if he had.”

I went with him to a college in London one afternoon where he delivered a lecture on Dryden, to prove that poetry can carry a certain cargo of argument but that argument can’t raise the smallest flight of poetry.  Dry as it sounds, it was as good a literary performance as I recall I ever heard.

At his “family” luncheon, I’ve found Lord Milner or Lord Lansdowne, or some literary man who had come in to find out from Lady Rayleigh how to conduct the Empire or to write a great book; and the modest old chemical Lord sits silent most of the time and now and then breaks loose to confound them all with a pat joke.  This is a vigorous family, these Balfours.  There’s one of them (a cousin of some sort, I think, of the Foreign Secretary) who is a Lord of much of Scotland, about as tall as Ben Nevis is high—­a giant of a man.  One of his sons was killed early in the war and one was missing—­whether dead or not he did not know.  Mrs. Page expressed her hope one day to the old man that he had had news from his missing son.  “No, no,” said he simply, “and me lady is awearying.”

We’ve been lucky, Mr. President, in these days of immortal horrors and of difficulties between two governments that did not know one another—­uncommonly lucky, in the large chances that politics gives for grave errors, to have had two such men in the Foreign Office here as Lord Grey and Mr. Balfour.  There are men who were mentioned for this post that would have driven us mad—­or to war with them.  I’m afraid I’ve almost outgrown my living hero worship.  There isn’t worshipful material enough lying around in the world to keep a vigorous reverence in practice.  But these two gentlemen by birth and culture have at least sometimes seemed of heroic size to me.  It has meant much to know them well.  I shall always be grateful to them, for in their quiet, forceful way they helped me much to establish right relations with these people—­which, pray God, I hope to retain through whatever new trials we may yet encounter.  For it will fall to us yet to loose and to free the British, and a Briton set free is an American.  That’s all you can do for a man or for a nation of men.

These Foreign Secretaries are not only men of much greater cultivation than their Prime Ministers but of greater moral force.  But I’ve come to like Lloyd George very much.  He’d never deliver a lecture on Dryden, and he doesn’t even play a good game of golf;