h convictions and presume to express
them as American Ambassador apparently outraged those same elements in
this country who railed against Great Britain in this Panama Tolls
debate.

On August 16, 1913, the City of Southampton, England, dedicated a
monument in honour of the _Mayflower_ Pilgrims--Southampton having been
their original point of departure for Massachusetts. Quite appropriately
the city invited the American Ambassador to deliver an address on this
occasion; and quite appropriately the Ambassador acknowledged the debt
that Americans of to-day owed to the England that had sent these
adventurers to lay the foundations of new communities on foreign soil.
Yet certain historic truths embodied in this very beautiful and eloquent
address aroused considerable anger in certain parts of the United
States. "Blood," said the Ambassador, "carries with it that particular
trick of thought which makes us all English in the last resort. . . . And
Puritan and Pilgrim and Cavalier, different yet, are yet one in that
they are English still. And thus, despite the fusion of races and of the
great contributions of other nations to her 100 millions of people and
to her incalculable wealth, the United States is yet English-led and
English-ruled." This was merely a way of phrasing a great historic
truth--that overwhelmingly the largest element in the American
population is British in origin[51]; that such vital things as its
speech and its literature are English; and that our political
institutions, our liberty, our law, our conceptions of morality and of
life are similarly derived from the British Isles. Page applied the word
"English" to Americans in the same sense in which that word is used by
John Richard Green, when he traces the history of the English race from
a German forest to the Mississippi Valley and the wilds of Australia.
But the anti-British elements on this side of the water, taking
"English-led and English-ruled" out of its context, misinterpreted the
phrase as meaning that the American Ambassador had approvingly called
attention to the fact that the United States was at present under the
political control of Great Britain! Senator Chamberlain of Oregon
presented a petition from the _Staatsverband Deutschsprechender Vereine
von Oregon_, demanding the Ambassador's removal, while the
Irish-American press and politicians became extremely vocal.

Animated as was this outburst, it was mild compared with the excitement