The letters which Page sent directly to the President were just as frank.  “Incidents occur nearly every day,” he wrote to President Wilson in the autumn of 1915, “which reveal the feeling that the Germans have taken us in.  Last week one of our naval men, Lieutenant McBride, who has just been ordered home, asked the Admiralty if he might see the piece of metal found on the deck of the Hesperian.  Contrary to their habit, the British officer refused.  ‘Take my word for it,’ he said.  ’She was torpedoed.  Why do you wish to investigate?  Your country will do nothing—­will accept any excuse, any insult and—­do nothing.’  When McBride told me this, I went at once to the Foreign Office and made a formal request that this metal should be shown to our naval attache, who (since Symington is with the British fleet and McBride has been ordered home) is Lieutenant Towers.  Towers was sent for and everything that the Admiralty knows was shown to him and I am sending that piece of metal by this mail.  But to such a pass has the usual courtesy of a British naval officer come.  There are many such instances of changed conduct.  They are not hard to endure nor to answer and are of no consequence in themselves but only for what they denote.  They’re a part of war’s bitterness.  But my mind runs ahead and I wonder how Englishmen will look at this subject five years hence, and it runs afield and I wonder how the Germans will regard it.  A sort of pro-German American newspaper correspondent came along the other day from the German headquarters; and he told me that one of the German generals remarked to him:  ’War with America?  Ach no!  Not war.  If trouble should come, we’d send over a platoon of our policemen to whip your little army.’ (He didn’t say just how he’d send ’em.)”

     To the President

     American Embassy, London, Oct. 5, 1915.

     DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: 

I have two letters that I have lately written to you but which I have not sent because they utterly lack good cheer.  After reading them over, I have not liked to send them.  Yet I should fail of my duty if I did not tell you bad news as well as good.

The high esteem in which our Government was held when the first Lusitania note to Germany was sent seems all changed to indifference or pity—­not hatred or hostility, but a sort of hopeless and sad pity.  That ship was sunk just five months ago; the German Government (or its Ambassador) is yet holding conversations about the principle involved, making “concessions” and promises for the future, and so far we have done nothing to hold the Germans to accountability[10].  In the meantime their submarine fleet has been so reduced that probably the future will take care of itself and we shall be used as a sort of excuse for their failure.  This is what the English think and say; and they explain our failure to act by concluding that the peace-at-any-price sentiment