ct and is already having an amazing influence on their
opinion of our Government. Lord Mersey, a distinguished law lord
and a fine old fellow of the very best type of Englishman, said to
me last Sunday, "I wish to thank you for stopping half-way in
reducing your tariff; that will only half ruin us." A lady of a
political family (Liberal) next whom I sat at dinner the other
night (and these women know their politics as no class of women
among us do) said: "Tell me something about your great President.
We hadn't heard much about him nor felt his hand till your tariff
bill passed. He seems to have real power in the Government. You
know we do not always know who has power in your Government." Lord
Grey, the one-time Governor-General of Canada, stopped looking at
the royal wedding presents the other evening long enough to say:
"The United States Government is waking up--waking up."

I sum up these atmospheric conditions--I do not presume to call
them by so definite a name as recommendations:

We are in the international game--not in its Old World intrigues
and burdens and sorrows and melancholy, but in the inevitable way
to leadership and to cheerful mastery in the future; and everybody
knows that we are in it but us. It is a sheer blind habit that
causes us to continue to try to think of ourselves as aloof. They
think in terms of races here, and we are of their race, and we
shall become the strongest and the happiest branch of it.

While we play the game with them, we shall play it better by
playing it under their long-wrought-out rules of courtesy in
everyday affairs.

We shall play it better, too, if our Government play it
quietly--except when the subject demands publicity. I have heard
that in past years the foreign representatives of our Government
have reported too few things and much too meagrely. I have heard
since I have been here that these representatives become timid
because Washington has for many a year conducted its foreign
business too much in the newspapers; and the foreign governments
themselves are always afraid of this.

Meantime I hardly need tell you of my appreciation of such a chance
to make so interesting a study and to enjoy so greatly the most
interesting experience, I really believe, in the whole world. I
only