File No. 763.72/13494
Memorandum of the Ambassador in Great Britain (Page) of a conversation with Lord Bryce, July 31, 1916
[Received August (17?), 1916.]
Lord Bryce spoke of the President’s declaration that we were not concerned with the causes or objects of the war and he said that that remark had caused much talk—all, as he thought, on a misunderstanding of Mr. Wilson’s meaning. “He meant, I take it, only that he did not propose at that time to discuss the causes or the objects of the war; and it is a pity that his sentence was capable of being interpreted to mean something else; and the sentence was published and discussed here apart from its context—a most unfair proceeding. I can imagine that the President and his friends may be much annoyed by this improper interpretation.”
I remarked that the body of the speech in which this remark occurred might have been written in Downing Street, so friendly was it to the Allies. “Quite, quite,” said he.
[Page 44]This was at dinner, Lady Bryce and Mrs. Page and he and I only being present.
When he and I went into the library, he talked more than an hour. The British Government had made a mistake, he said, in taking first-class mails from neutral ships on the high seas, or in forcing neutral ships into British ports to examine such mails. “How is that regarded in the United States?” I replied, “As an irritating and inexcusable blunder.” “I am not surprised,” said he.
“And what about this black list?” I told him. He had been in France for a week and did not know just what had been done. He said that that also seemed to him a mistake. “The Government doesn’t know America; neither does the British public. Neither does the American Government (no American government) know the British. Hence your Government writes too many notes. All governments are likely to write too many notes. Everybody gets tired of seeing them and they lose their effect.”
He mentioned the blockade and said that it had become quite effective—wonderfully effective, in fact; and he implied that he did not see why we now failed to recognize it. Our refusal to recognize it had caused and doubtless is now causing such ill feeling as exists in England.
Then he talked long about peace and how it would probably be arranged. He judged, from letters that he receives from the United States as well as from Americans who come over here, that there was an expectation in America that the President would be called in at the peace settlement and that some persons even expected him to offer mediation. He did not see how that could be. He knew no precedent for such a proceeding. The President might, of course, on the definite request of either side make a definite inquiry of the other side; but such a course would be, in effect, merely the transmission of an inquiry.
But after peace was made and the time came to set up a league for enforcing peace, or some such machinery, of course the United States would be and would have to be a party to that if it were to succeed. He reminded me that a little group of men here, of which he was one, early in the war sketched substantially the same plan that the American League to Enforce Peace has worked out. It had not seemed advisable to have any general public discussion of it in England till the war should end: nobody had time now to give to it.
As he knew no precedent for belligerents to Call in a third party when they met to end a war, so he knew no precedent for any outside government to protest against the invasion of a country by a power that had signed a treaty to guarantee the integrity of the invaded country—no precedent, that is to say, for the United States to protest against the invasion of Belgium. “That precedent,” I said, “was found in hysteria.”
Lord Bryce, who had just returned from a visit to the British headquarters in France, hardly dared hope for the end of the war till next year; and the intervening time between now and the end would be a time, he feared, of renewed atrocities and increasing hatred. He cited the killing of Captain Fryatt of the Brussels and the forcible deportation of young women from Lille and other towns in the provinces of France occupied by the Germans.
[Page 45]The most definite idea that he had touching American-British relations was the fear that the anti-British feeling in the United States would become stronger and would outlast the war. “It is organized,” he said. “The disaffected Germans and the disaffected Irish are interested in keeping it up.” He asked what effect I thought the presidential campaign would have on this feeling. He seemed to have a fear that somehow the campaign would give an occasion for stirring it up even more.
Lord Bryce spoke of the pressure brought to bear on the Foreign Office and on the Government in general by the military and naval people—“the fighting people and their friends.” The easy inference from his remarks is that he does not regard “the fighting people” as always well-informed or judicious. Of this pressure and of the accuracy of this judgment my own experience with the Government has given abundant evidence.
“Goodbye. Give my regards to all my American friends; and I’m proud to say there are a good many of them.”