course of his Presidential campaign, had himself spoken
approvingly of free tolls for American ships. The probability is that,
when the President made this unfortunate reference to this clause in the
Democratic programme, he had given the matter little personal
investigation; it must be held to his credit that, when the facts were
clearly presented to him, his mind quickly grasped the real point at
issue--that it was not a matter of commercial advantage or
disadvantage, but one simply of national honour, of whether the United
States proposed to keep its word or to break it.

Page's contempt for the hair-drawn technicalities of lawyers was
profound, and the tortuous effort to make the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty mean
something quite different from what it said, inevitably moved him to
righteous wrath. Before sailing for England he spent several days in the
State Department studying the several questions that were then at issue
between his country and Great Britain. A memorandum contains his
impressions of the free tolls contention:

"A little later I went to Washington again to acquaint myself with
the business between the United States and Great Britain. About
that time the Senate confirmed my appointment, and I spent a number
of days reading the recent correspondence between the two
governments. The two documents that stand out in my memory are the
wretched lawyer's note of Knox about the Panama tolls (I never read
a less sincere, less convincing, more purely artificial argument)
and Bryce's brief reply, which did have the ring of sincerity in
it. The diplomatic correspondence in general seemed to me very dull
stuff, and, after wading through it all day, on several nights as I
went to bed the thought came to me whether this sort of activity
were really worth a man's while."

Anything which affected British shipping adversely touched Great Britain
in a sensitive spot; and Page had not been long in London before he
perceived the acute nature of the Panama situation. In July, 1913, Col.
Edward M. House reached the British capital. A letter of Page's to Sir
Edward Grey gives such a succinct description of this new and
influential force in American public life that it is worth quoting:

To Sir Edward Grey

Coburg Hotel, London.

[No date.]

DEAR SIR EDWARD:

There is an American gentleman in London, the like of whom I do not
know.