[Footnote 59:  This, of course, is Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1917.]

[Footnote 60:  This letter is dated London and was probably begun there.  It is evident, however, that the latter part was written at Brighton, where the Ambassador was taking a brief holiday.]

[Footnote 61:  This was a long document describing conditions in great detail.]

[Footnote 62:  The Navy Department had taken the position that arming merchantmen was the best protection against the submarine.  This statement was intended to refute this belief.]

[Footnote 63:  Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education Board, who was sent at this time to deliver lectures throughout Great Britain on the United States.]

CHAPTER XXIII

PAGE—­THE MAN

The entrance of America into the war, followed by the successful promotion of the Balfour visit, brought a period of quiet into Page’s life.  These events represented for him a personal triumph; there were many things still to be done, it is true, and Page, as always, was active in advancing the interests that were nearest his heart; yet the mighty relief that followed the American declaration was the kind that one experiences after accomplishing the greatest task of a lifetime.  Page’s letters have contained many references to the sense of moral isolation which his country’s policy had forced upon him; he probably exaggerated his feeling that there was a tendency to avoid him; this was merely a reflection of his own inclination to keep away from all but the official people.  He now had more leisure and certainly more interest in cultivating the friends that he had made in Great Britain.  For the fact is that, during all these engrossing years, Page had been more than an Ambassador; by the time the United States entered the war he had attained an assured personal position in the life of the British capital.  He had long since demonstrated his qualifications for a post, which, in the distinction of the men who have occupied it, has few parallels in diplomacy.  The scholarly Lowell, the courtly Bayard, the companionable Hay, the ever-humorous Choate, had set a standard for American Ambassadors which had made the place a difficult one for their successors.  Though Page had characteristics in common with all these men, his personality had its own distinctive tang; and it was something new to the political and social life of London.  And the British capital, which is extremely exacting and even merciless in its demands upon its important personages, had found it vastly entertaining.  “I didn’t know there could be anything so American as Page except Mark Twain,” a British literary man once remarked; and it was probably this strong American quality, this directness and even breeziness of speech and of method, this absence of affectation, this almost openly expressed contempt for finesse and even for tradition, combined with those other traits which we like to think of as American—­an upright purpose, a desire to serve not only his own country but mankind—­which made the British public look upon Page as one of the most attractive and useful figures in a war-torn Europe.