Walter Hines Page to Woodrow Wilson

The submarines have become a very grave danger. The loss of British and Allied tonnage increases with the longer and brighter days--as I telegraphed you, 237,000 tons last week; and the worst of it is, the British are not destroying them. The Admiralty published a weekly report which, though true, is not the whole truth. It is known in official circles here that the Germans are turning out at least two a week--some say three; and the British are not destroying them as fast as new ones are turned out. If merely the present situation continue, the war will pretty soon become a contest of endurance under hunger with an increasing proportion of starvation. Germany is yet much the worse off, but it will be easily possible for Great Britain to suffer to the danger point next winter or earlier unless some decided change be wrought in this situation.

One help--how great it is yet somewhat too soon to know--will come when all merchantmen are armed and properly manned. Arming here is going on, and, of course, all our trans-Atlantic ships are armed.

But the greatest help, I hope, can come from us--our destroyers and similar armed craft,--provided we can send enough of them quickly. The area to be watched is so big that many submarine-hunters are needed. Early in the war the submarines worked near shore. There are very many more of them now and their range is one hundred miles, or even two hundred, at sea.

The public is becoming very restive with its half-information, and it is more and more loudly demanding all the facts. There are already angry threats to change the personnel of the Admiralty: there is even talk of turning out the Government. "We must have results, we must have results." I hear confidentially that Jellicoe has threatened to resign unless the Salonika expedition is brought back: to feed and equip that force requires too many ships.

And there are other troubles impending. Norway has lost so many of her ships that she dare not send what are left to sea. Unarmed they'll all perish. If she arm them, Germany will declare war against her. There is a plan on foot for the British to charter these Norwegian ships and to arm them, taking the risk of German war against Norway. If war come (and it is expected), England must then defend Norway the best she can. She will close the German access to Norway with mines and with such of the Grand Fleet as can be spared. And then England may ask for our big ships to help in these waters. All this is yet in the future, but possibly not far in the future.

For the present the only anti-submarine help is the help we may be able to give to patrol the wide area off Ireland. If we had one hundred destroyers to send the job there could, I am told, be quickly done. A third of that number will help mightily. At the present rate of destruction more than four million tons will be sunk before the summer is gone.

Such is this dire submarine danger. The English thought that they controlled the sea; the Germans, that they were invincible on land. Each side is losing where it thought itself strongest.Admiral Sims is of the greatest help imaginable. Of course, I gave him an office in one of our Embassy buildings, and the Admiralty has given him an office also with them. He spends much of his time there, and they have opened all doors and all desks and drawers to him. He strikes me (and the English so regard him) as a man of admirable judgment--unexcitable and indefatigable. I hope we'll soon send a General over, to whom the War Department will act similarly. Hoover, too, must have a good man here as, I dare say, he has already made known. These will cover the Navy, the Army, Food and Shipping. Perhaps a Censor and an Intelligence (Secret Service) group ought to come. I mean these for permanent--at least indefinite--service. Exchange visits by a Congressional Committee (such as the French and British make) and by high official persons such as members of your Cabinet (such also as the French and British make)--you will have got ideas about these from Mr. Balfour.

It is a remarkable commentary on the insularity of the British and on our studied isolation that till Balfour went over not a member of this Government had ever met a member of our Administration! Quite half our misunderstandings were due to this. If I had the making of the laws of the two Governments, I'd have a statutory requirement that at least one visit a year by high official persons should be made either way. We should never have had a blacklist, etc., etc., etc., etc., if that had been done. When I tried the quite humble task of getting Polk to come and the excuse was made that he couldn't be spared from his desk--Mr. President, I fear we haven't half enough responsible official persons in our Government. I should say that no man even of Polk's rank ought to have a desk: just as well give him a mill-stone. Even I try not to have a desk: else I'd never get anything of importance done; for I find that talks and conferences in my office and in the Government offices and wherever else I can find out things take all my waking hours. The Foreign Office here has about five high-position men to every one in the State Department. God sparing me, I'm going one of these days to prepare a paper for our Foreign Affairs Committees on the Waste of Having too Few High-Grade Men in the Department of State: a Plea for Five Assistant Secretaries for Every One Now Existing and for Provision for International Visits by them. Why, I had to do a corresponding thing in my little publishing business before we could make a dollar.

Here's an ancient and mouldy precedent that needs shattering--for the coming of our country into its proper station and influence in the world.

I am sure that Balfour's visit has turned out as well as I hoped, and my hopes were high. He is one of the most interesting men that I've ever had the honor to know intimately--he and Lord Grey. Mr. Balfour is a Tory, of course; and in general I don't like Tories. But he became a Tory by accident. Old Lord Salisbury, his uncle, had his political bringing up. Else, I think, he would have called himself a Liberal. Liberal he surely is--a sort of high-toned Scotch democrat. I have studied him with increasing charm and interest. Not infrequently when I am in his office just before luncheon he says, "Come, walk over and we'll have lunch with the family." He's a bachelor. One sister lives with him. Another (Lady Rayleigh, the wife of the great chemist and Chancellor of Cambridge University) frequently visits him. Either of those old ladies could rule this Empire. Then there are nieces and cousins always about--people of rare cultivation, every one of 'em. One of those girls confirmed the story that "Uncle Arthur" one day concluded that the niblick was something more than a humble necessity of a bad golfer--that it had positive virtues of its own and had suffered centuries of neglect. He, therefore, proceeded to play with the niblick only, till he proved his case and showed that it is a club entitled to the highest respect.

Perhaps I wrote you the story of what a bluff old Admiral, Lord Fisher, said a year or more ago when he was told that Mr. Balfour was to be appointed First Lord of the Admiralty: "By God! that'll be a failure. Arthur Balfour is too much of a gentleman."

A fierce old Liberal fighter in Parliamentary warfare, who entered politics about the time Mr. Balfour did, told me this story the other day. "I've watched Balfour for about forty years as a cat watches a rat. I hate his party. I hated him till I learned better, for I hated that whole Salisbury crowd. They wanted to Cecil everything. But I'll tell you, Sir, apropos of his visit to your country, that in all those years he has never spoken of the United States except with high respect and often with deep affection. I should have caught him, if he had."

I went with him to a college in London one afternoon where he delivered a lecture on--Dryden, to prove that poetry can carry a certain cargo of argument but that argument can't raise the smallest light of poetry. Dry as it sounds, it was as good a literary performance as I recall I ever heard.

At his "family" luncheon, I've found Lord Milner or Lord Lansdowne, or some literary man who had come in to find out from old Lady Rayleigh how to conduct the Empire or to write a great book; and the modest old chemical Lord sits silent most of the time and now and then breads loose to confound them all with a pat joke. That's a vigorous family, these Balfours. There's one of them (a cousin, I think, of the Foreign Secretary) who is a Lord of much of Scotland), about as tall as Ben Nevis is high--a giant of a man. One of his sons was killed early in the war and one was missing--whether dead or not he did not know. Mrs. Page expressed her hope one day to the old man that he had had news from his missing son. "No, no," said he simply, "and I'm sorry to say me lady grows aweary."

We've been lucky, Mr. President, in these days of immortal horrors and of difficulties between two Governments that did not know one another--uncommonly lucky, in the large chances that politics gives for grave errors, to have had two such men in the Foreign Office here as Lord Grey and Mr. Balfour. There are men who were mentioned for this post that would have driven us mad--or to war with them. I'm afraid I've almost outgrown my living-hero worship. There isn't worshipful material enough lying around in the world to keep a vigorous reverence in practice. But these two gentlemen by birth and culture have at least sometimes seemed of heroic size to me. It has meant much to know them well. I shall always be grateful to them, for in their quiet, forceful way they helped me much to establish right relations with these people--which, pray God, I hope to retain through whatever new trials we may yet encounter. For it will fall to us yet to loose and to free the British, and a Briton set free is an American. That's all you can do for a man or for a nation of men.

These Foreign Secretaries are not only men of much greater cultivation than their Prime Ministers but of greater moral force. But I've come to like Lloyd George very much. He doesn't always hold his knife and fork as a Prime Minister, I am sure, ought to hold them; he'd never deliver a lecture on Dryden, and he doesn't even play a good game of golf; but he has what both Lord Grey and Mr. Balfour lack--a touch of genius,--whatever that is--not the kind that takes infinite pains but the kind that acts as an electric light flashed in the dark. He said to me the other day that experts have nearly been the death of him. "The Government has experts, experts, experts everywhere. In any Department where things are not going well, I have found boards and committees and committees and boards of experts. But in one Department at least I've found a substitute for them. I let twenty experts go and I put in one MAN, and things began to move at once. Do you know any real MEN? When you hear of any, won't you let me know?"

A little while ago he dined with me, and, after dinner, I took him to a corner of the drawing room and delivered your message to him about Ireland. "God knows, I'm trying. Tell the President that. And tell him to talk to Balfour." Presently he broke out--"Madmen, madmen--I never saw any such task," and he pointed across the room to Sir Edward Carson, his First Lord of the Admiralty--"madmen." "But the President's right. We've got to settle it and we've got to settle it now." Carson and Jellicoe came across the room and sat down with us. "I've been telling the Ambassador, Carson, that we've got to settle the Irish question now--in spite of you."

"I'll tell you something else we've got to settle now," said Carson. "Else it'll settle us. That's the submarines. The press and public are working up a calculated and concerted attack on Jellicoe and me, and, if they get us, they'll get you. It's an attack on the Government made on the Admiralty. Prime Minister," said this Ulster pirate whose civil war didn't come off only because the big war was begun--"Prime Minister, it may be a fierce attack. Get ready for it." Well, it has been developing ever since. But I can't for the life of me guess at the possible results of an English Parliamentary attack on a government. It's like a baseball man watching a game of cricket. He can't see when the player is out or why, or what caused it. Of course the submarine may torpedo Lloyd George and his Government. It looks very like it may overturn the Admiralty, as Gallipoli did. If this public finds out the whole truth, it will demand somebody's head. But I'm only a baseball man: cricket is beyond me.

But Lloyd George will outlive the war as an active force, whatever happen to him in the meantime. He's too heavily charged with electricity to stop activity. The war has ended a good many careers that seemed to have long promise. It is ending more every day. But there is only one Lloyd George, and, whatever else he lack, he doesn't lack life.

I heard all the speeches in both Houses on the resolution of appreciation of our coming into the war. Sonar Law's, Asquith's (one of the best), Dillon's, a Labor man's; and, in the Lords, Curzon's, 's, the Archbishop's (who delivered in the course of his remarks a benediction on me) and Bryce's (almost the best of all). It wasn't "oratory," but it was well-said and well-meant. They know how badly they need help and they do mean to be as good to us as their benignant insularity will permit. They are changing. I can't describe the great difference that the war has made in them. They'll almost become docile in a little more time.

And we came in in the nick of time for them--in very truth. If we hadn't, their exchange would have gone down soon and they know it. I shall never forget the afternoon I spent with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bonar Law on that subject. They saw blue ruin without our financial help. And now, if we can save them from submarines, those that know will know how vital our help was. Again, the submarine is the great and grave and perhaps the only danger now. If that can be scotched, I believe the whole Teutonic military structure would soon tumble. If not, the Germans may go on as long as they can feed their army, allowing their people to starve.

Of course, you know, we're on rations now--most bountiful rations, too bountiful in fact. But these queer people (they are the most amusing and confusing and contradictory of all God's creatures, these English, whose possibilities are infinite and whose actualities, in many ways, are pitiful)--these queer people are fiercely pursuing food-economy by discussing in the newspapers whether a hen consumes more food than she produces, and whether what dogs eat contains enough human food to justify the shooting of every one in the Kingdom. That's the way we are coming down to humble fare. But nothing can quite starve a people who all live near the sea which yields fish enough near shore to feed them wastefully.

All along this South shore (I'm spending a day at Brighton), where I am to-day, I see the stars and stripes; and everywhere there is a demand for the words and music of the Battle-Hymn of the Republic and the Star-Spangled Banner.

This our-new-Ally business is bringing me a lot of amusing trouble. Theatres offer me boxes, universities offer me degrees, hospitals solicit visits from me, clubs offer me dinners--I'll have to get a new private secretary or two well-trained to say "No" politely, else I shalln't have my work done. But all that will presently wear away as everything wears away (quickly, too) in the grim face of this bloody monster of war which is consuming men as a prairie fire consumes blades of grass. There's a family that lives around the corner from this hotel. One son is in the trenches, another is in a madhouse from shell-shock, a third coming home wounded the other day was barely rescued when a torpedo sank a hospital ship, and he may lose his reason. I suppose I saw one hundred men this afternoon on a single mile of beach who had lost both legs. Through the wall from my house in London is a hospital. A young Texan has been there both whose legs are gone at the thighs and one hand at the elbow. God pity us for not having organized the world better than this! We'll do it, yet, Mr. President--you'll do it; and thank God for you. If we do not organize Europe and make another such catastrophe impossible, life will not be worth being born into except to the few whose days happen to fall between recurring devastations of the world.

Yours heartily,