ing in Washington from Sir
Edward Grey. It must be said, in justice to Mr. Bryan, that this
carelessness was nothing particularly new, for it had worried many
ambassadors before Page. Readers of Charles Francis Adams's
correspondence meet with the same complaints during the Civil War; even
at the time of the _Trent_ crisis, when for a fortnight Great Britain
and the United States were living on the brink of war, Adams was kept
entirely in the dark about the plans of Washington[2]. The letters of
John Hay show a similar condition during his brief ambassadorship to
Great Britain in 1897-1898[3].

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 Departm