he declined
to abrogate his conscience where his personal judgment of the rights and
wrongs of the conflict were concerned. "Neutrality," he said in a letter
to his brother, Mr. Henry A. Page, of Aberdeen, N.C., "is a quality of
government--an artificial unit. When a war comes a government must go in
it or stay out of it. It must make a declaration to the world of its
attitude. That's all that neutrality is. A government can be neutral,
but no _man_ can be."

"The President and the Government," Page afterward wrote, "in their
insistence upon the moral quality of neutrality, missed the larger
meaning of the war. It is at bottom nothing but the effort of the Berlin
absolute monarch and his group to impose their will on as large a part
of the world as they can overrun. The President started out with the
idea that it was a war brought on by many obscure causes--economic and
the like; and he thus missed its whole meaning. We have ever since been
dealing with the chips which fly from the war machine and have missed
the larger meaning of the conflict. Thus we have failed to render help
to the side of Liberalism and Democracy, which are at stake in the
world."

Nor did Page think it his duty, in his private communications to his
Government and his friends, to maintain that attitude of moral
detachment which Mr. Wilson's pronouncement had evidently enjoined upon
him. It was not his business to announce his opinions to the world, for
he was not the man who determined the policy of the United States; that
was the responsibility of the President and his advisers. But an
ambassador did have a certain role to perform. It was his duty to
collect information and impressions, to discover what important people
thought of the United States and of its policies, and to send forward
all such data to Washington. According to Page's theory of the
Ambassadorial office, he was a kind of listening post on the front of
diplomacy, and he would have grievously failed had he not done his best
to keep headquarters informed. He did not regard it as "loyalty" merely
to forward only that kind of material which Washington apparently
preferred to obtain; with a frankness which Mr. Wilson's friends
regarded as almost ruthless, Page reported what he believed to be the
truth. That this practice was displeasing to the powers of Washington
there is abundant evidence. In early December, 1914, Colonel House was
compelled to transmit a warning to the American A