the whole of the relations between your country and ours would have been in peril.  And if the two countries had gone apart instead of coming together the whole fate of the world would be very different from what I hope it will now be.

I have often thought that the forces behind public affairs are so tremendous that individuals have little real, even when much apparent, influence upon the course of events.  But in the early years of the war I think everything might have gone wrong if it had not been that certain men of strong moral conviction were in certain places.  And you were preeminently one of these.  President Wilson I am sure was another, though I know him only through you and Colonel House and his own public utterances.  Even so your influence must have counted in his action, by your friendship with him as well as by the fact of your being the channel through which communications passed between him and us.

     I cannot adequately express what it was to me personally in the
     dark days of 1914, 1915, and 1916 to know how you felt about the
     great issues involved in the war.

I go to Fallodon at the end of this week and come to London the first week of September—­if you and Mrs. Page have not left by then I hope I may see you.  I long to do so before you go.  I wish you may recover perfect health.  My eyesight continues to fail and I shall soon be absolutely dependent upon other eyes for reading print.  Otherwise I feel as well as a schoolboy, but it is depressing to be so well and yet so crippled in sight.

Please do not trouble to answer this letter—­you must have too many letters of the kind to be able to reply to them separately—­but if there is a chance of my seeing you before you go please let me have a message to say when and where.

     Yours sincerely,
     GREY OF F.

A few months before his resignation Page had received a letter from Theodore Roosevelt, who was more familiar than most Americans with Page’s work in London.  This summed up what will be probably the judgment of history upon his ambassadorship.  The letter was in reply to one written to the Ex-President, asking him to show hospitality to the Archbishop of York[78], who was about to visit the United States.

     (Office of the Metropolitan Magazine)
     342 Fourth Ave., New York,
     March 1st, 1918.

     MY DEAR MR. AMBASSADOR: 

I am very much pleased with your letter, and as soon as the Archbishop arrives, he will be addressed by me with all his titles, and I will get him to lunch with me or dine with me, or do anything else he wishes!  I shall do it for his own sake, and still more, my dear fellow, I shall do it for the sake of the Ambassador who has represented America in London during these trying years as no other Ambassador in London has ever represented us, with the exception of Charles Francis Adams, during the Civil War.

     Faithfully yours,
     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.