y; and, if the
peoples of the two countries hold fast, a victory would be won at
last--at sea.

_To Ralph W. Page_

Rest Harrow, Sandwich, Kent.
May 19, 1918.

DEAR RALPH:

I felt very proud yesterday when I read T.R.'s good word in the
_Outlook_ about your book[76]. If I had written what he said
myself--I mean, if I had written what I think of the book--I should
have said this very thing. And there is one thing more I should
have said, viz.:--All your life and all my life, we have cultivated
the opinion at home that we had nothing to do with the rest of the
world, nothing to do with Europe in particular--and in our
political life our hayseed spokesmen have said this over and over
again till many people, perhaps most people, came really to believe
that it was true. Now this aloofness, this utterly detached
attitude, was a pure invention of the shirt-sleeve statesman at
home. I have long concluded, for other reasons as well as for this,
that these men are the most ignorant men in the whole world; more
ignorant--because they are viciously ignorant--than the Negro boys
who act as caddies at Pinehurst; more ignorant than the inmates of
the Morganton Asylum; more ignorant than sheep or rabbits or
idiots. They have been the chief hindrances of our country--worse
than traitors, in effect. It is they, in fact, who kept our people
ignorant of the Germans, ignorant of the English, ignorant of our
own history, ignorant of ourselves. Now your book, without
mentioning the subject, shows this important fact clearly, by
showing that our aloofness has all been a fiction. _We've been in
the world--and right in the middle of the world--the whole time_.

And our public consciousness of this fact has enormously slipped
back. Take Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Jefferson; take Hay,
Root--and then consider some of our present representatives! One
good result of the war and of our being in it will be the
restoration of our foreign consciousness. Every one of the half
million, or three million, soldiers who go to France will know more
about foreign affairs than all Congress knew two years ago.

A stay of nearly five years in London (five years ago to-day I was
on the ship coming here) with no absence long enough to give any
real rest, have got my digestion w