on was one which would provide a great feast for the lawyers.
That Page sympathized with this British determination to keep 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