ls in France do
not share it. Lord French once said to me and General Robertson,
too, that when they feel despondent in London, they go to the front
and get cheered up. But it does seem to be a long job. Evidently
the Germans mean to fight to the last man unless they can succeed
in inducing the Allies to meet them to talk it over without naming
their terms in advance. That is what Lord Lansdowne favours, and no
public outgiving by any prominent man in England has called forth
such a storm of protest since the war began. I think I see the
genesis of his thought, and it is this: there is nothing in his
letter and there was nothing in the half dozen or more rather long
conversations that I have had with him on other subjects to show
that he has the slightest conception of democracy as a social creed
or as a political system. He is, I think, the most complete
aristocrat that I have ever met. He doesn't see the war at all as a
struggle between democracy and its opposite. He sees it merely as a
struggle between Germany and the Allies; and inferentially he is
perfectly willing the Kaiser should remain in power. He is of
course a patriotic man and a man of great cultivation. But he
doesn't see the deeper meaning of the conflict. Add to this defect
of understanding, a long period of bad health and a lasting
depression because of the loss of his son, and his call to the
war-weary ceases to be a surprise.

I am, dear Mr. President,
Sincerely yours,
WALTER H. PAGE.

_To Arthur W. Page_

American Embassy,
London, December 23, 1917.

DEAR ARTHUR:

I sent you a Christmas cable yesterday for everybody. That's about
all I can send in these days of slow mail and restricted shipping
and enormously high prices; and you gave all the girls each $100
for me, for the babies and themselves? That'll show 'em that at
least we haven't forgotten them. Forgotten? Your mother and I are
always talking of the glad day when we can go home and live among
them. We get as homesick as small boys their first month at a
boarding school. Do you remember the day I left you at
Lawrenceville, a forlorn and lonely kid?--It's like that.

A wave of depression hangs over the land like a London fog. And
everybody on this tired-out side of the world shows a dispos