Before and during the secret mission of Colonel House, begun in May, 1914, the President was, with more or less vacillation, wholly absorbed by his Mexican programme. On April 20, he requested of Congress the privilege of making war on General Huerta, having previously, on April 14, sent the whole Atlantic fleet to Vera Cruz. On April 21, while the Senate was considering this situation, Congress not having yet given its approval, Mexican soil was invaded; a pitched battle was fought; Vera Cruz was captured and occupied; 126 Mexicans were killed and 195 were wounded, including women and children, besides 19 American soldiers killed and 70 wounded. The excuse for all this was a technical discussion between diplomatists regarding a salute to the American flag.

With this background, although no war was then in sight in Europe, the Balkan troubles being at an end, Colonel House proceeded to propose disarmament to the Kaiser.

The record of that adventure is so well and completely told in the chapter on "America Tries to Prevent War", that it would be an act of vandalism to deflower it in a paragraph. At Berlin the German officers, suspecting the mission of the President's emissary, did all in their power to prevent a personal conversation with the Kaiser without the presence of a listener; but, although the Colonel carried his point and obtained a private audience, the Kaiser himself spoiled the purpose of the meeting by doing most of the talking. In another field the Colonel came off better. Pressed by the military officers, who wanted to discuss with him as fellow-officers certain military questions, to explain his rank, he informed them that he was not a military, but only a "geographical colonel".

At London the Colonel had been given his proper rank through Page's introduction of him to Sir Edward Grey, on a previous occasion, as "a private citizen, a man without personal political ambition, a modest, quiet, even shy fellow, who helps to make Cabinets, to shape policies, to select judges and ambassadors and suchlike merely for the pleasure of seeing that these tasks are well done." In that rôle he was well received in London, but his mission for disarmament ended in opposition at Berlin and at London in indifference. "But just think," said the Colonel to

the Ambassador, when war fell like a bolt from heaven, "how near we came to making such a catastrophe impossible!" "No, no, no,” answered Page. "No power on earth could have prevented it."

Let no one fail to read that thrilling chapter on "The Grand Smash". What a panorama of weeping ambassadors, muddled strivings for fitness in war, hysterical Americans, multiplied diplomatic duties in deserted embassies taken over by our Embassy-before then so humble among them all—and in the midst of the chaos and turmoil an American Ambassador, transformed from an amateur diplomat trying to work great combinations with an unpracticed hand, standing now like a tower of strength and refuge surrounded by his faithful secretaries, with Laughlin, full of Berlin memories, at the head; cool, businesslike, sympathetic, vibrant with noble emotions but perfect master of them all! No more rubbish about "shooting ideas" into inferior races by armies and navies-Vera Cruz and the retreat of the American forces with their purpose still unachieved exploded all that. No more bravado about "continuing to shoot men for two hundred years till they learn to vote and rule themselves". No more boasting about "the good fortune to do one piece of work that was worth the effort and worth coming to do, about that infernal Mexican situation". No pæan about our "using the British fleet, the British Empire, and the English race," when we have "the leadership of the world"! For Page, the period of all that was ended. It was realities, the grim realities of war, that faced him now. If the sentinel had been dreaming at his post, he was now wide awake.

From the beginning he was not personally neutral, and he resented the President's exhortation addressed to the American people,-"We must be impartial in thought as well as in action." "Neutrality," Page wrote in a letter to his brother, "is a quality of government. A government can be neutral but no man can be." The President, he thought, had totally missed the larger meaning of the war. With this belief he found his official duties extremely embarrassing. "If German bureaucratic brute force could conquer Europe," he wrote in September, 1914 "presently it would try to conquer the United States; and we

should go back to the era of war as man's chief industry and to the domination of kings by divine right." He had in hand the proof from Germany itself that it was there believed that the "ultimate enemy" of that country was America.

"Waging neutrality," as Page called it, was for the Ambassador a perplexing task. His antipathy to lawyers and their methods added greatly to his difficulty. It was undoubtedly right that, as a neutral, the Department of State should urge the adoption of some sure law of the sea; and the Declaration of London, which the United States had ratified but other nations had not, was a recent and the most complete code of maritime rules; but he saw, and he was right in this, that Great Britain could not be bound by a code she had not recognized. He further saw that Great Britain would not accept any law that deprived her of that clear supremacy on the sea which, apart from the submarine, she undoubtedly possessed. This made Page and Sir Edward Grey, the former pushed by the Department of State, the latter by the British Admiralty, protagonists of contradictory positions which both regretted to be obliged to hold.

Another source of deepest anxiety was the peace propaganda. These records show how diligently it was pressed by the German Government and those who sympathized with it; always, as Colonel House discovered on his second peace mission to Germany, in the sense that "peace" was to be only a "truce" until war could be renewed with a better chance for the success of the aggressor. In the course of time this became so apparent that it could no longer be doubted by anyone who could appreciate evidence.

What impeded both judgment and action in America was the deplorable ignorance of Europe, in which the President shared. Indeed, the President, to whom everyone naturally looked for leadership, seemed the most incapable of all to grasp the truth. The sinking of the Lusitania was a blow that should have awakened the most somnolent intelligence to at least a lively perception. To Page the President's attitude regarding it was a shock that left him stupefied. The announcement that we were too proud to fight" awakened in Great Britain, as it did in Germany, a sentiment of contempt that soon bred a complete

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indifference. The first note on "strict accountability" suspended judgment for a time; but stolidity to the outrages that succeeded, following upon the ignominious retreat from Mexico, made the Ambassador feel that his country, the country of his pride and his devotion, was nothing to the world. Not ostracized he was too much esteemed for that-but secluded, pained and humiliated to look his friends in the face, the path from his home to his chancellery was the loneliest beat that a neglected sentinel ever trod.

With a courage that is almost without example on the part of a diplomatic officer, Page, in the hope of stirring his old friend and admired leader to a sense of the situation, through letters to House, the confidant of both, and directly to the President himself, while plodding on in the disheartening task of trying to secure regard for the rights of a nation neutral in the midst of an assault he believed to be directed against itself, did not hesitate to pour the truth, as he saw it, into the mind of the President, only to find himself regarded with coldness and suspicion, neglected and discredited.

In the winter of 1917, unexpected events and revelations forced the Administration at Washington to accept the truth Page had so long but ineffectually urged upon it. New labors and responsibilities were thus thrust upon him by America's entrance into the war, and shortly before the armistice, worn out and dying, he was obliged to abandon his post; but he lived to know of the victory of which, even in the darkest hours, he had never wholly despaired.

It would be a fitting tribute to the memory of a great American and a valuable lesson in world history that is still in the making,

if

every citizen of the United States could read these inimitable volumes-so replete with facts which, in an article like this, cannot be even briefly summarized-the pathetic but inspiring record of a noble endeavor to serve our country and the world. DAVID JAYNE HILL.

TINKERING WITH THE ARMY

BY MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM HARDING CARTER, U. S. A.

WHEN the Armistice was declared in 1918, the American people exhibited far more interest in dismantling the costly military and naval establishments built up during the World War than in profiting by their recent military lessons. Salvaging of war material then seemed more important, in an economical way, than any schemes for avoiding similar experiences in future. The nation, to be sure, had learned the fallacy of its previous attitude as to our geographical isolation, for if we could transport across the seas, in face of courageous and daring submarine activity, two million men, with material and supplies necessary for waging successful war, other nations could do likewise when in future the current of military activities should be reversed. But our hearts were not in it, and when the Administration sponsored a proposal for retaining an army of nearly six hundred thousand men, based on the League of Nations, the Congress was aroused and determined not only to defeat such a plan, but to go farther and reduce the establishments authorized prior to America's entrance into the war.

Out of mighty travail and much investigation of our alleged failures to measure up to expectations during the war, the statutes providing for the national defense were amended to provide definitely for preserving a knowledge of modern war, in its material and scientific aspects, as well as in the utilization of officers trained in the latest methods of organizing and preparing the human element. On the theory that our future needs would be best met by a large corps of officers and a small Regular Army, trained in conjunction with Organized Reserves, and the National Guards of the States, a well balanced scheme was adopted as our future military policy, and the necessary steps to carry it out were undertaken by those in authority.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and scarcely had the new