You're doing the bigger job: as the world now is, there is no other job so big as yours or so well worth doing; but I'm having more fun. I'm having more fun than anybody else anywhere. It's a large window you look through on the big world—here in London; and, while I am for the moment missing many of the things that I've most cared about hitherto (such as working for the countryman, guessing at American public opinion, coffee that's fit to drink, corn bread, sunshine, and old faces) big new things come on the horizon. Yet a man's personal experiences are nothing in comparison with the large job that our Government has to do in its Foreign Relations. I'm beginning to begin to see what it is. The American people are taken most seriously here. I'm sometimes almost afraid of the respect and even awe in which they hold us. But the American Government is a mere joke to them. They don't even believe that we ourselves believe in it. We've had no foreign policy, no continuity of plan, no matured scheme, no settled way of doing things and we seem afraid of Irishmen or Germans or some "element" when a chance for real action comes. I'm writing to the President about this and telling him stories to show how it works.
We needn't talk any longer about keeping aloof. If Cecil Spring Rice would tell you the complaints he has already presented and if you saw the work that goes on here—more than in all the other posts in Europe—you'd see that all the old talk about keeping aloof is Missouri buncombe. We're very much "in," but not frankly in.
I wish you'd keep your eye on these things in cabinet meetings. The English and the whole English world are ours, if we have the courtesy to take them—fleet and trade and all; and we go on pretending we are afraid of "entangling alliances." What about disentangling alliances?
We're in the game. There's no use in letting a few wild Irish or cocky Germans scare us. We need courtesy and frankness, and the destinies of the world will be in our hands. They'll fall there anyhow after we are dead; but I wish to see them come, while my own eyes last. Don't you?
Heartily yours,
W.H.P.
To Robert N. Page[29]
London, December 22, 1913.
MY DEAR BOB:
. . . We have a splendid, big old house—not in any way pretentious—a commonplace house in fact for fashionable London and the least showy and costly of the Embassies. But it does very well—it's big and elegantly plain and dignified. We have fifteen servants in the house. They do just about what seven good ones would do in the United States, but they do it a great deal better. They pretty nearly run themselves and the place. The servant question is admirably solved here. They divide the work according to a fixed and unchangeable system and they do it remarkably well—in their own slow English way. We simply let them alone, unless something important happens to go wrong. Katharine simply tells the butler that we'll have twenty-four people to dinner to-morrow night and gives him a list of them. As they come in, the men at the door address every one correctly—Your Lordship or Your Grace, or what not. When they are all in, the butler comes to the reception room and announces dinner. We do the rest. As every man goes out, the butler asks him if he`ll have a glass of water or of grog or a cigar; he calls his car, puts him in it, and that's the end of it. Bully good plan. But in the United States that butler, whose wages are less than the ramshackle nigger I had at Garden City to keep the place neat, would have a business of his own. But here he is a sort of duke downstairs. He sits at the head of the servants' table and orders them around and that's worth more than money to an Old World servile mind.
The "season" doesn't begin till the King comes back and Parliament opens, in February. But every kind of club and patriotic and educational organization is giving its annual dinner now. I've been going to them and making after-dinner speeches to get acquainted and also to preach into them some little knowledge of American ways and ideals. They are very nice—very. You could not suggest or imagine any improvement in their kindness and courtesy. They do all these things in some ways better than we. They have more courtesy. They make far shorter speeches. But they do them all too much alike. Still they do get much pleasure out of them and much instruction too.
Then we are invited to twice as many private dinners and luncheons as we can attend. At these, these people are at their best. But it is yet quite confusing. A sea of friendly faces greets you—you can't remember the names. Nobody ever introduces anybody to anybody; and if by accident anybody ever tries, he simply says "Uh-o-oh-Lord Xzwwxkmpt." You couldn't understand it if you had to be hanged.