believe. But I understood then (and I am sure the
subject lay in your mind in the same way) that my service would be
for four years at the most. I made all my arrangements,
professional and domestic, on this supposition. I shall, therefore,
be ready to lay down my work here on March 4th or as soon
thereafter as meets your pleasure.

I am more than proud of the confidence that you have shown in me.
To it I am indebted for the opportunity I have had to give such
public service to my country as I could, as well as for the most
profitable experience of my life. A proper and sympathetic
understanding between the two English-speaking worlds seems to me
the most important duty of far-seeing men in either country. It has
taken such a profound hold on me that I shall, in whatever way I
can, work for its complete realization as long as I can work for
anything.

I am, Mr. President, most faithfully and gratefully yours,

WALTER H. PAGE.

This letter was written at a time when President Wilson was exerting his
best energies to bring about peace. The Presidential campaign had caused
him to postpone these efforts, for he believed that neither Germany nor
Great Britain could take seriously the activities of a President whose
own political position was insecure. At the time Page's letter was
received, the President was thinking only of a peace based upon a
stalemate; it was then his apparent conviction that both sides to the
struggle were about equally in the wrong and that a decisive victory of
either would not be a good thing for the world. Yet it is interesting to
compare this letter with the famous speech which the President made six
months afterward when he asked Congress to declare the existence of a
state of war with Germany. Practically all the important reasons which
Mr. Wilson then advanced for this declaration are found in Page's letter
of the preceding November. That autocracies are a constant menace to
world peace, that the United States owes it to its democratic tradition
to take up arms against the enemy of free government, that in doing
this, it was not making war upon the German people, but upon its
imperialistic masters--these were the arguments which Page laid before
the President in his letter of resignation, and these were the leading
ideas in Mr. Wilson's address of April 2nd. There are even sentences in
Page's communication which