But Mr. Bryan’s incumbency was guilty of diplomatic vices which were peculiarly its own.  The “leaks” in the State Department, to which Page has already referred, were constantly taking place; the Ambassador would send the most confidential cipher dispatches to his superior, cautioning the Department that they must be held inviolably secret, and then he would pick up the London newspapers the next morning and find that everything had been cabled from Washington.  To most readers, the informal method of conducting foreign business, as it is disclosed in these letters, probably comes as something of a shock.  Page is here discovered discussing state matters, not in correspondence with the Secretary of State, but in private unofficial communications to the President, and especially to Colonel House—­the latter at that time not an official person at all.  All this, of course, was extremely irregular and, in any properly organized State Department, it would have been even reprehensible.  But the point is that there was no properly organized State Department at that time, and the impossibility of conducting business through the regular channels compelled Page to adopt other means.  “There is only one way to reform the State Department,” he informed Colonel House at this time.  “That is to raze the whole building, with its archives and papers, to the ground, and begin all over again.”

This state of affairs in Washington explains the curious fact that the real diplomatic history of the United States and Great Britain during this great crisis is not to be found in the archives of the State Department, for the official documents on file there consist of the most routine telegrams, which are not particularly informing, but in the Ambassador’s personal correspondence with the President, Colonel House, and a few other intimates.  The State Department did not have the first requisite of a properly organized foreign office, for it could not be trusted with confidential information.  The Department did not tell Page what it was doing, but it apparently told the whole world what Page was doing.  It is an astonishing fact that Page could not write and cable the most important details, for he was afraid that they would promptly be given to the reporters.

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“I shall not send another confidential message to the State Department,” Page wrote to Colonel House, September 15, 1914; “it’s too dangerous.  Time and time again now the Department has leaked.  Last week, I sent a dispatch and I said in the body of it, ’this is confidential and under no condition to be given out or made public, but to be regarded as inviolably secret.’  The very next morning it was telegraphed from Washington to the London newspapers.  Bryan telegraphed me that he was sure it didn’t get out from the Department and that he now had so fixed it that there could be no leak.  He’s said that at least four times before.  The Department swarms with