mbassador at London.
"The President wished me to ask you to please be more careful not to
express any unneutral feeling, either by word of mouth, or by letter and
not even to the State Department. He said that both Mr. Bryan and Mr.
Lansing had remarked upon your leaning in that direction and he thought
that it would materially lessen your influence. He feels very strongly
about this."

Evidently Page did not regard his frank descriptions of England under
war as expressing unneutral feeling; at any rate, as the war went on,
his letters, even those which he wrote to President Wilson, became more
and more outspoken. Page's resignation was always at the President's
disposal; the time came, as will appear, when it was offered; so long as
he occupied his post, however, nothing could turn him from his
determination to make what he regarded as an accurate record of events.
This policy of maintaining an outward impartiality, and, at the same
time, of bringing pressure to bear on Washington in behalf of the
Allies, he called "waging neutrality."

Such was the mood in which Page now prepared to play his part in what
was probably the greatest diplomatic drama in history. The materials
with which this drama concerned itself were such apparently lifeless
subjects as ships and cargoes, learned discourses on such abstract
matters as the doctrine of continuous voyage, effective blockade, and
conditional contraband; yet the struggle, which lasted for three years,
involved the greatest issue of modern times--nothing less than the
survival of those conceptions of liberty, government, and society which
make the basis of English-speaking civilization. To the newspaper reader
of war days, shipping difficulties signified little more than a
newspaper headline which he hastily read, or a long and involved
lawyer's note which he seldom read at all--or, if he did, practically
never understood. Yet these minute and neglected controversies presented
to the American Nation the greatest decision in its history. Once
before, a century ago, a European struggle had laid before the United
States practically the same problem. Great Britain fought Napoleon, just
as it had now been compelled to fight the Hohenzollern, by blockade;
such warfare, in the early nineteenth century, led to retaliations, just
as did the maritime warfare in the recent conflict, and the United
States suffered, in 1812, as in 1914, from what were regarded as the
depredations of bot