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

by Burton Jesse Hendrick

Occasionally Page discussed with Sir Edward Grey an alternative American policy which was in the minds of most people at that time:

To the President

. . . The foregoing I wrote before this Mexican business took its present place. I can't get away from the feeling that the English simply do not and will not believe in any unselfish public action—further than the keeping of order. They have a mania for order, sheer order, order for the sake of order. They can't see how anything can come in any one's thought before order or how anything need come afterward. Even Sir Edward Grey jocularly ran me across our history with questions like this:

"Suppose you have to intervene, what then?"

"Make 'em vote and live by their decisions."

"But suppose they will not so live?"

"We'll go in again and make 'em vote again."

"And keep this up 200 years?" asked he.

"Yes," said I. "The United States will he here two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves."