It is thus apparent that when the Germans practically demanded, as a price of their abstention from indiscriminate submarine warfare, that Mr. Wilson should move against Great Britain in the matter of the blockade, they realized the futility of any such step, and that what they really expected to obtain was the presidential mediation for peace.  President Wilson at once began to move in this direction.  On May 27th, three weeks after the Sussex “pledge,” he made an address in Washington before the League to Enforce Peace, which was intended to lay the basis for his approaching negotiations.  It was in this speech that he made the statement that the United States was “not concerned with the causes and the objects” of the war.  “The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or to explain.”  This was another of those unfortunate sentences which made the President such an unsympathetic figure in the estimation of the Allies and seemed to indicate to them that he had no appreciation of the nature of the struggle.  Though this attitude of non-partisanship, of equal balance between the accusations of the Allies and Germany, was intended to make the President acceptable as a mediator, the practical result was exactly the reverse, for Allied statesmen turned from Wilson as soon as those sentences appeared in print.  The fact that this same oration specified the “freedom of the seas” as one of the foundation rocks of the proposed new settlement only accentuated this unfavourable attitude.

This then was clearly the “atmosphere” which prevailed in Washington at the time that Page was summoned home.  But Page’s letters of this period indicate how little sympathy he entertained for such negotiations.  “It is quite apparent,” he had recently written to Colonel House, “that nobody in Washington understands the war.  Come over and find out.”  Extracts from a letter which he wrote to his brother, Mr. Henry A. Page, of Aberdeen, North Carolina, are especially interesting when placed side by side with the President’s statements of this particular time.  These passages show that a two years’ close observation of the Prussians in action had not changed Page’s opinion of their motives or of their methods; in 1916, as in 1914, Page could see in this struggle nothing but a colossal buccaneering expedition on the part of Germany.  “As I look at it,” he wrote, “our dilly-dallying is likely to get us into war.  The Germans want somebody to rob—­to pay their great military bills.  They’ve robbed Belgium and are still robbing it of every penny they can lay their hands on.  They robbed Poland and Serbia—­two very poor countries which didn’t have much.  They set out to rob France and have so far been stopped from getting to Paris.  If they got to Paris there wouldn’t be thirty cents’ worth of movable property there in a week, and they’d levy fines of millions of francs a day.  Their military scheme and teaching and open purpose is to make somebody pay for their vast military outlay of the last forty years.  They must do that or go bankrupt.  Now it looks as if they would go bankrupt.  But in a little while they may be able to bombard New York and demand billions of dollars to refrain from destroying the city.  That’s the richest place left to spoil.