much now on this side the world, for the censor had forbidden the publication of this open letter lest it should possibly cause American-German trouble!  Then the American correspondents came in to verify a report that a news agency is said to have had that I was deluged with threatening letters!—­More widows, more mothers looking for lost sons!...  Once in a while—­far less often than if I lived in a sane and normal world—­I get a few hours off and go to a lonely golf club.  Alas! there is seldom anybody there but now and then a pair of girls and now and then a pair of old fellows who have played golf for a century.  Yet back in London in the War Office I hear they indulge in disrespectful hilarity at the poor game I play.  Now how do they know? (You’d better look to your score with Grayson:  the English have spies in America.  A major-general in their spy-service department told Mrs. Page that they knew all about Archibaldi[21] before he got on the ship in New York.)

All this I send you not because it is of the slightest permanent importance (except the English judgment of us) but because it will prove, if you need proof, that the world is gone mad.  Everything depends on fighting power and on nothing else.  A victory will save the Government.  Even distinctly hopeful military news will.  And English depression will vanish with a turn of the military tide.  If it had been Bernstorff instead of Dumba—­that would have affected even the English judgment of us.  Tyrrell[22] remarked to me—­did I write you?  “Think of the freaks of sheer, blind Luck; a man of considerable ability like Dumba caught for taking a risk that an idiot would have avoided, and a fool like Bernstorff escaping!” Then he added:  “I hope Bernstorff will be left.  No other human being could serve the English as well as he is serving them.”  So, you see, even in his depression the Englishman has some humour left—­e.g., when that old sea dog Lord Fisher heard that Mr. Balfour was to become First Lord of the Admiralty, he cried out:  “Damn it! he won’t do:  Arthur Balfour is too much of a gentleman.”  So John Bull is now, after all, rather pathetic—­depressed as he has not been depressed for at least a hundred years.  The nobility and the common man are doing their whole duty, dying on the Bosphorus or in France without a murmur, or facing an insurrection in India; but the labour union man and the commercial class are holding hack and hindering a victory.  And there is no great national leader.

     Sincerely yours,
     WALTER H. PAGE.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 16:  Count Beckendorff.]

[Footnote 17:  Afterward private secretary to Premier Lloyd George.]

[Footnote 18:  A messenger in the American Embassy.]

[Footnote 19:  The Rt.  Hon. Reginald McKenna.]

[Footnote 20:  Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 21:  It was Archibald’s intercepted baggage that furnished the documents which caused Dumba’s dismissal.]