about America and the American ignorance of England are monumental, stupendous, amazing, passing understanding.  I have on my mantelpiece a statuette of Benjamin Franklin, an excellent and unmistakable likeness which was made here during his lifetime; and the inscription burnt on its base is Geo. Washington.  It serves me many a good turn with my English friends.  I use it as a measure of their ignorance of us.  Of course this is a mere little error of a statuette-maker, an error, moreover, of a hundred years ago.  But it tells the story of to-day also.  If I had to name the largest and most indelible impression that has been made on me during my five years’ work here, I should say the ignorance and aloofness of the two peoples—­not an ignorance of big essential facts but of personalities and temperaments—­such as never occur except between men who had never seen one another.

But I was writing about Mr. Baker’s visit and I’ve got a long way from that.  I doubt if he knows himself what gratification it gave; for these men here have spoken to me about it as they could not speak to him.

Here is an odd fact:  For sixty years, so far as I know, members of the Administration have had personal acquaintance with some of the men in power in Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru, etc., etc., and members of the British Government have had personal acquaintance with some men in authority in Portugal, Serbia, Montenegro and Monte Carlo; but during this time (with the single exception of John Hay) I think no member of any Administration had a real personal acquaintance while he held office with any member of the British Government while he held office, and vice versa—­till Mr. Balfour’s visit.  Suspicion grows out of ignorance.  The longer I live here the more astonished I become at the fundamental ignorance of the British about us and of our fundamental ignorance about them.  So colossal is this ignorance that every American sent here is supposed to be taken in, to become Anglophile; and often when one undertakes to enlighten Englishmen about the United States one becomes aware of a feeling inside the English of unbelief, as if he said, “Oh, well! you are one of those queer people who believe in republican government.”  All this is simply amazing.  Poor Admiral Sims sometimes has a sort of mania, a delusion that nobody at Washington trusts his judgment because he said seven or eight years ago that he liked the English.  Yet every naval officer who comes here, I understand, shares his views about practically every important naval problem or question.  I don’t deserve the compliment (it’s a very high one) that some of my secretaries sometimes pay me when they say that I am the only man they know who tries to tell the whole truth to our Government in favour of the Englishman as well as against him.  It is certain that American public opinion is universally supposed to suspect any American who tries to do anything with the British lion except to twist his tail—­a supposition that I never believed to be true.—­But it is true that the mutual ignorance is as high as the Andes and as deep as the ocean.  Personal acquaintance removes it and nothing else will.

     To Arthur W. Page