hese records are, of
course, carefully preserved in the archives of the Foreign Office.]

[Footnote 25: The Rev. Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, the well-known Vicar
of Crosthwaite, Keswick, poet and student of Wordsworth. President
Wilson, who used occasionally to spend his vacation in the Lake region,
was one of his friends.]

[Footnote 26: It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the Ambassador was
thinking only of a diplomatic "fight."]

[Footnote 27: The Underwood Bill revising the tariff "downward" became a
law October, 1913. It was one of the first important measures of the new
Wilson Administration.]

[Footnote 28: Secretary of Agriculture in President Wilson's Cabinet.]

[Footnote 29: Of Aberdeen, North Carolina, the Ambassador's brother.]

[Footnote 30: Of Pinehurst, North Carolina, the Ambassador's eldest
son.]

[Footnote 31: Mr. and Mrs. Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law and daughter of
President Wilson, at that time on their honeymoon trip in Europe.]

[Footnote 32: Mr. Robert N. Page, the Ambassador's brother, was at this
time a Congressman from North Carolina.]

[Footnote 33: This is from a letter to President Wilson.]

CHAPTER VI

"POLICY" AND "PRINCIPLE" IN MEXICO

I

The last days of February, 1913, witnessed one of those sanguinary
scenes in Mexico which for generations had accompanied changes in the
government of that distracted country. A group of revolutionists
assailed the feeble power of Francisco Madero and virtually imprisoned
that executive and his forces in the Presidential Palace. The Mexican
army, whose most influential officers were General Blanquet and General
Victoriano Huerta, was hastily summoned to the rescue of the Government;
instead of relieving the besieged officials, however, these generals
turned their guns upon them, and so assured the success of the uprising.
The speedy outcome of these transactions was the assassination of
President Madero and the seizure of the Presidency by General Huerta.
Another outcome was the presentation to Page of one of the most delicate
problems in the history of Anglo-American relations.

At almost any other time this change in the Mexican succession would
have caused only a momentary disturbance. There was nothing new in the
violent overthrow of government in Latin-America; in Mexico itself no
president had ever risen to power except by revolution. The career of
Porfirio Diaz, who had maintained his authority for a third of a
centur