To Ralph W. Page

     Rest Harrow, Sandwich, Kent. 
     May 19, 1918.

     DEAR RALPH: 

I felt very proud yesterday when I read T.R.’s good word in the Outlook about your book[76].  If I had written what he said myself—­I mean, if I had written what I think of the book—­I should have said this very thing.  And there is one thing more I should have said, viz.:—­All your life and all my life, we have cultivated the opinion at home that we had nothing to do with the rest of the world, nothing to do with Europe in particular—­and in our political life our hayseed spokesmen have said this over and over again till many people, perhaps most people, came really to believe that it was true.  Now this aloofness, this utterly detached attitude, was a pure invention of the shirt-sleeve statesman at home.  I have long concluded, for other reasons as well as for this, that these men are the most ignorant men in the whole world; more ignorant—­because they are viciously ignorant—­than the Negro boys who act as caddies at Pinehurst; more ignorant than the inmates of the Morganton Asylum; more ignorant than sheep or rabbits or idiots.  They have been the chief hindrances of our country—­worse than traitors, in effect.  It is they, in fact, who kept our people ignorant of the Germans, ignorant of the English, ignorant of our own history, ignorant of ourselves.  Now your book, without mentioning the subject, shows this important fact clearly, by showing that our aloofness has all been a fiction. We’ve been in the world—­and right in the middle of the world—­the whole time.

And our public consciousness of this fact has enormously slipped back.  Take Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Jefferson; take Hay, Root—­and then consider some of our present representatives!  One good result of the war and of our being in it will be the restoration of our foreign consciousness.  Every one of the half million, or three million, soldiers who go to France will know more about foreign affairs than all Congress knew two years ago.

A stay of nearly five years in London (five years ago to-day I was on the ship coming here) with no absence long enough to give any real rest, have got my digestion wrong.  I’ve therefore got a real leave for two months.  Your mother and I have a beautiful house here that has been lent to us, right on the Channel where there’s nothing worth bombing and where as much sunshine and warmth come as come anywhere in England.  We got here last night and to-day is as fine an early spring day as you ever had in the Sandhills.  I shall golf and try to find me an old horse to ride, and I’ll stay out in the sunshine and try to get the inside machinery going all right.  We may have a few interruptions, but I hope not many, if the Germans leave us alone.  Your mother has got to go to Newcastle to christen a new British warship—­a compliment the Admiralty