The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
by . Volume III: Containing the Letters to Woodrow Wilson. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. 1925. Large 8vo. x+440 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
No single impression produced by this valuable contribution to the diplomatic, and personal, history of the war is stronger than the impression of sadness. The volume is built round the letters of Page to Wilson from 1913 to 1918. Under that provision of the law of copyright which gives to the recipient of letters the possession of them as physical property and to the writer and his heirs the rights of publication, most of these — manuscript letters of which no copies were kept — could not be used when the two earlier volumes of this work were published in 1922, and have become available for print only since President Wilson’s death. Their sadness lies in their revelation of the divergence of two friends so close in their sympathies as Wilson and Page had been for many years before the war, and as they naturally would have been after it.
It would perhaps be more accurate to define this divergence as that of one friend, for all the expressions of dissent come from Page and his interpreter, Mr. Hendrick. The sole intimation of Wilson’s feeling about Page’s many letters —in which he performed supremely well an ambassador’s function of reporting with sympathy and understanding to his home Government the unseen currents and influences affecting international relations — is found in the summary of one of Mr. Wilson’s infrequent letters to Mr. Page: ‘The President, in his reply, informed Page that his letters were interesting and valuable and asked him to continue writing them. He expressed his regret that the great pressure of public duties prevented him from writing more frequently; the whole tone, indeed, was amiable and friendly and cheered the Ambassador.’ With expression so scant on one side and so abundant on the other, the reader feels somewhat in the position of a juryman who has listened to the testimony of the plaintiff, and, unless he has served on a jury before, can hardly persuade himself that anything remains to be Said for the defendant.
With respect to an ambassador’s second funcion — his representing, with sympathy and understanding, the Government that appointed him to his post — the book raises questions of diplomatic propriety which must await the answers of experts in statecraft. The inexpert may bear several things in mind: that when Page set out on his mission to England in 1913 Wilson’s direct charge to him was. ‘Go, and be yourself’; that in the literal fulfillment of this charge Page, through the year and a half following the sinking of the Lusitania, came not only to lack sympathy with the Wilson administration in its conduct of foreign relations, but completely to lose confidence — according to Mr. Hendrick on page 290 — in the President himself; and that, in spite of this feeling, he withheld his resignation until after Wilson’s second election, when all ambassadors, however sympathetic with their chief, might have been expected to resign - and when Page himself was asked to continue in his post.
How could the first-hand record of one side of such an experience be other than sad? On both sides the difficulties must have been extreme. Of Page’s honest devotion to the course to which his generous nature prompted him, there can be no question — nor of the brilliancy and permanent value of many of his letters. Of certain things it was much easier to be sure, though not inevitably right, in London than in Washington. On certain points of war-time detail, especially in the Department of State, the book presents issues on which the patient juryman will need a deal of evidence from the defense. Meanwhile a careful reading of this volume will show that the personal sympathies of the accomplished editor have, not unnaturally, given some color to his interpretations of the letters. None would ask him to hold inviolate the de mortuis adage. At least there is here no addition, as in other recent books, of an ab mortuis animosity.
M. A. DE WOLFE HOWE