There are at least seventeen more destroyers employed on our Atlantic coast, where there is no war, not to mention numerous other very useful anti-submarine craft, including sea-going tugs, etc.

Can you not do something to bring our Government to an understanding of how very serious the situation is?  Would it not be well to send another telegram to Mr. Lansing and the President, and also send them the enclosed correspondence?

     I am sending this by mail because I may be somewhat delayed in
     returning to London.

     Very sincerely yours,

     Wm. S. Sims.

Page immediately acted on this suggestion.

     Most confidential for the Secretary of State and President only

Sims sends me by special messenger from Queenstown the most alarming reports of the submarine situation which are confirmed by the Admiralty here.  He says that the war will be won or lost in this submarine zone within a few months.  Time is of the essence of the problem, and anti-submarine craft which cannot be assembled in the submarine zone almost immediately may come too late.  There is, therefore, a possibility that this war may become a war between Germany and the United States alone.  Help is far more urgently and quickly needed in this submarine zone than anywhere else in the whole war area.

     Page.

The United States had now been in the war for three months and only twenty-eight of the sixty destroyers which were available had been sent into the field.  Yet this latest message of Page produced no effect, and, when Admiral Sims returned from Queenstown, the two men, almost in despair, consulted as to the step which they should take next.  What was the matter?  Was it that Washington did not care to get into the naval war with its full strength, or was it that it simply refused to believe the representations of its Admiral and its Ambassador?  Admiral Sims and Page went over the whole situation and came to the conclusion that Washington regarded them both as so pro-British that their reports were subject to suspicion.  Just as Page had found that the State Department, and its “trade advisers,” had believed that the British were using the blockade as a means of destroying American trade for the benefit of Britain, so now he believed that Mr. Daniels and Admiral Benson, the Chief of Naval Operations, evidently thought that Great Britain was attempting to lure American warships into European waters, to undergo the risk of protecting British commerce, while British warships were kept safely in harbour.  Page suggested that there was now only one thing left to do, and that was to request the British Government itself to make a statement to President Wilson that would substantiate his own messages.

“Whatever else they think of the British in Washington,” he said, “they know one thing—­and that is that a British statesman like Mr. Balfour will not lie.”