foodstuffs out of Germany, his correspondence shows.  Day after day the “protests” from Washington rained upon his desk.  The history of our foreign relations for 1915 and 1916 is largely made up of an interminable correspondence dealing with seized cargoes, and the routine of the Embassy was an unending nightmare of “demands,” “complaints,” “precedents,” “cases,” “notes,” “detentions” of Chicago meats, of Southern cotton, and the like.  The American Embassy in London contains hundreds of volumes of correspondence which took place during Page’s incumbency; more material has accumulated for those five years than for the preceding century and a quarter of the Government’s existence.  The greater part of this mass deals with intercepted cargoes.

The following extract from a letter which Page wrote at this time gives a fair idea of the atmosphere that prevailed in London while this correspondence was engaging the Ambassador’s mind: 

The truth is, in their present depressed mood, the United States is forgotten—­everything’s forgotten but the one great matter in hand.  For the moment at least, the English do not care what we do or what we think or whether we exist—­except those critics of things-in-general who use us as a target since they must take a crack at somebody.  And I simply cannot describe the curious effect that is produced on men here by the apparent utter lack of understanding in the United States of the phase the war has now entered and of the mood that this phase has brought.  I pick up an American paper eight days old and read solemn evidence to show that the British Government is interrupting our trade in order to advance its own at our expense, whereas the truth is that the British Government hasn’t given six seconds’ thought in six months to anybody’s trade—­not even its own.  When I am asked to inquire why Pfister and Schmidt’s telegram from New York to Schimmelpfenig and Johann in Holland was stopped (the reason is reasonably obvious), I try to picture to myself the British Minister in Washington making inquiry of our Government on the day after Bull Run, why the sailing boat loaded with persimmon blocks to make golf clubs is delayed in Hampton Roads.

I think I have neither heard nor read anything from the United States in three months that didn’t seem so remote as to suggest the captain of the sailing ship from Hongkong who turned up at Southampton in February and had not even heard that there was a war.  All day long I see and hear women who come to ask if I can make inquiry about their sons and husbands, “dead or missing,” with an interval given to a description of a man half of whose body was splashed against a brick wall last night on the Strand when a Zeppelin bomb tore up the street and made projectiles of the pavement; as I walk to and from the Embassy the Park is full of wounded and their nurses; every man I see tells me of a new death; every member of the Government talks about military events or of Balkan