ies of the world will be in our hands. They'll fall there
anyhow after we are dead; but I wish to see them come, while my own
eyes last. Don't you?

Heartily yours,

W.H.P.

_To Robert N. Page_[29]

London, December 22, 1913.

MY DEAR BOB:

. . . We have a splendid, big old house--not in any way
pretentious--a commonplace house in fact for fashionable London and
the least showy and costly of the Embassies. But it does very
well--it's big and elegantly plain and dignified. We have fifteen
servants in the house. They do just about what seven good ones
would do in the United States, but they do it a great deal better.
They pretty nearly run themselves and the place. The servant
question is admirably solved here. They divide the work according
to a fixed and unchangeable system and they do it remarkably
well--in their own slow English way. We simply let them alone,
unless something important happens to go wrong. Katharine simply
tells the butler that we'll have twenty-four people to dinner
to-morrow night and gives him a list of them. As they come in, the
men at the door address every one correctly--Your Lordship or Your
Grace, or what not. When they are all in, the butler comes to the
reception room and announces dinner. We do the rest. As every man
goes out, the butler asks him if he'll have a glass of water or of
grog or a cigar; he calls his car, puts him in it, and that's the
end of it. Bully good plan. But in the United States that butler,
whose wages are less than the ramshackle nigger I had at Garden
City to keep the place neat, would have a business of his own. But
here he is a sort of duke downstairs. He sits at the head of the
servants' table and orders them around and that's worth more than
money to an Old World servile mind.

The "season" doesn't begin till the King comes back and Parliament
opens, in February. But every kind of club and patriotic and
educational organization is giving its annual dinner now. I've been
going to them and making after-dinner speeches to get acquainted
and also to preach into them some little knowledge of American ways
and ideals. They are very nice--very. You could not suggest or
imagine any improvement in their kindness and courtesy. They do all
these things in some ways better t