David H. Miller to Colonel House

Last evening I happened to meet Mr. Arthur Richmond Marsh who talked to me about The President's note to the Vatican. Mr. Marsh said that he thought that this note was the greatest state paper that had ever been written; that The President had shown himself to be not only the leading statesman of this age but of any age, and that he was the only man who had ever had the opportunity of speaking to the entire world and at the same time had shown himself equal to such opportunity. The President, he said, had achieved the impossible or, at least, what anyone would have said before reading his note to have been impossible; that while the Pope had used with extraordinary ability the only weapon left to the Vatican, namely, the weapon of an idea, The President had answered with the same kind of weapon and had written an answer that was itself unanswerable.

In speaking of what Mr. Marsh called the impossibility of The President's achievement, or in other words, its impossibility from an antecedent point of view, he said that The President had divided the world into two classes on the one side the Prussian autocracy and on the other side the rest of humanity. Mr. Marsh believes that the one thing in the world that the German oligarchy really fear is the compelling force throughout the world of the will and ideas of The President, and he believes that the note will create a visible upheaval in German opinion.

Mr. Marsh's last words to me on the subject were

"Since reading The President's note my head is in the clouds and I can think of nothing else."

Colonel E. M. House,
Magnolia, Massachusetts.


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