lson 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
wo