The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I

Burton Jesse Hendrick

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• Publié par: suin
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 39
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I, by Burton J. Hendrick This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I Author: Burton J. Hendrick Release Date: November 6, 2005 [EBook #17017] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF *** Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Walter H. Page THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE BY BURTON J. HENDRICK VOLUME I GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1922 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y. First Edition after the printing of 377 de luxe copies PREFATORY NOTE Among the many who have assisted in the preparation of this Biography especial acknowledgment is made to Mr. Irwin Laughlin, First Secretary and Counsellor of the London Embassy under Mr. Page. Mr. Page's papers show the high regard which he entertained for Mr. Laughlin's abilities and character, and the author similarly has found Mr. Laughlin's assistance indispensable. Mr. Laughlin has had the goodness to read the manuscript and make numerous suggestions, all for the purpose of reënforcing the accuracy of the narrative. The author gratefully remembers many long conversations with Viscount Grey of Fallodon, in which Anglo-American relations from 1913 to 1916 were exhaustively canvassed and many side-lights thrown upon Mr. Page's conduct of his difficult and delicate duties. The British Foreign Office most courteously gave the writer permission to examine a large number of documents in its archives bearing upon Mr. Page's ambassadorship and consented to the publication of several of the most important. B.J.H. CONTENTS VOLUME I CHAPTER I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. X. XI. XII. XIII. A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD JOURNALISM "THE FORGOTTEN MAN" THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS ENGLAND BEFORE THE WAR "POLICY" AND "PRINCIPLE" IN MEXICO PERSONALITIES OF THE MEXICAN PROBLEM HONOUR AND DISHONOUR IN PANAMA THE GRAND SMASH ENGLAND UNDER THE STRESS OF WAR "WAGING NEUTRALITY" GERMANY'S FIRST PEACE DRIVES PAGE 1 32 64 102 132 175 215 232 270 301 327 357 398 [pg I-vii] IX. AMERICA TRIES TO PREVENT THE EUROPEAN WAR LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Walter H. Page Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H. Page Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H. Page Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins University, 1876-1915 Walter H. Page (1899) from a photograph taken when he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education Board Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a leader in the cause of Southern Education 116 100 101 37 36 Frontispiece 20 21 [pg I-ix] Woodrow Wilson in 1912 Walter H. Page, from a photograph taken a few years before he became American Ambassador to Great Britain The British Foreign Office, Downing Street No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under Mr. Page Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at London, 1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919 117 292 293 308 309 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE [pg I-1] CHAPTER I A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD I The earliest recollections of any man have great biographical interest, and this is especially the case with Walter Page, for not the least dramatic aspect of his life was that it spanned the two greatest wars in history. Page spent his last weeks in England, at Sandwich, on the coast of Kent; every day and every night he could hear the pounding of the great guns in France, as the Germans were making their last desperate attempt to reach Paris or the Channel ports. His memories of his childhood days in America were similarly the sights and sounds of war. Page was a North Carolina boy; he has himself recorded the impression that the Civil War left upon his mind. "One day," he writes, "when the cotton fields were white and the elm leaves were falling, in the soft autumn of the Southern climate wherein the sky is fathomlessly clear, the locomotive's whistle blew a much longer time than usual as the train approached Millworth. It did not stop at so small a station except when there was somebody to get off or to get on, and so long a blast meant that someone was coming. Sam and I ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was. Sam was my Negro companion, [pg I-2] philosopher, and friend. I was ten years old and Sam said that he was fourteen. There was constant talk about the war. Many men of the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere—that was certain; but Sam and I had a theory that the war was only a story. We had been fooled about old granny Thomas's bringing the baby and long ago we had been fooled also about Santa Claus. The war might be another such invention, and we sometimes suspected that it was. But we found out the truth that day, and for this reason it is among my clearest early recollections. "For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box and gently laid it in the shade of the fence. The only man at the station was the man who had come to change the mail-bags; and he said that this was Billy Morris's coffin and that he had been killed in a battle. He asked us to stay with it till he could send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles away. The man came back presently and leaned against the fence till old Mr. Morris arrived, an hour or more later. The lint of cotton was on his wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news reached him; and he came in his shirt sleeves, his wife on the wagon seat with him. "All the neighbourhood gathered at the church, a funeral was preached and there was a long prayer for our success against the invaders, and Billy Morris was buried. I remember that I wept the more because it now seemed to me that my doubt about the war had somehow done Billy Morris an injustice. Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than anybody else; and she kept saying, while the service was going on, 'It'll be my John next.' In a little while, sure enough, John Gregory's coffin was put off the train, as Billy Morris's had been, and I regarded her as a woman gifted with prophecy. Other coffins, too, were put off from time [pg I-3] to time. About the war there could no longer be a doubt. And, a little later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift, deep experiences. "One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles away, near the capital. The General and the Governor sat on horses and the soldiers marched by them and the band played. They were going to the front. There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night. Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend whole days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers. So precious became woollen cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were unravelled to be spun and woven into new fabrics. And they baked bread and roasted chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to go to the soldiers at the front[1]." The quality that is uppermost in the Page stock, both in the past and in the present generation, is that of the builder and the pioneer. The ancestor of the North Carolina Pages was a Lewis Page, who, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, left the original American home in Virginia, and started life anew in what was then regarded as the less civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising tide of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which has never forsaken his descendants. His son, Anderson Page, manifesting this [pg I-4] same love of change, went farther south into Wake County, and acquired a plantation of a thousand acres about twelve miles north of Raleigh. He cultivated this estate with slaves, sending his abundant crops of cotton and tobacco to Petersburg, Virginia, a traffic that made him sufficiently prosperous to give several of his sons a college education. The son who is chiefly interesting at the present time, Allison Francis Page, the father of the future Ambassador, did not enjoy this opportunity. This fact in itself gives an insight into his character. While his brothers were grappling with Latin and Greek and theology—one of them became a Methodist preacher of the hortatory type for which the South is famous—we catch glimpses of the older man battling with the logs in the Cape Fear River, or penetrating the virgin pine forest, felling trees and converting its raw material to the uses of a growing civilization. Like many of the Page breed, this Page was a giant in size and in strength, as sound morally and physically as the mighty forests in which a considerable part of his life was spent, brave, determined, aggressive, domineering almost to the point of intolerance, deeply religious and abstemious—a mixture of the frontiersman and the Old Testament prophet. Walter Page dedicated one of his books[2] to his father, in words that accurately sum up his character and career. "To the honoured memory of my father, whose work was work that built up the commonwealth." Indeed, Frank Page—for this is the name by which he was generally known—spent his whole life in these constructive labours. He founded two towns in Nort