No attempt was made even at this momentous period to keep the London Embassy informed as to what was taking place in Washington; Page's letters and cablegrams were, for the most part, unacknowledged and unanswered, and the American Ambassador was frequently obliged to obtain his information about the state of feeling in Washington from Sir Edward Grey.

It must be said, in justice to Mr.Bryan, that this carelessness was nothing particularly new, for it had worried many ambassadors before Page.

Readers of Charles Francis Adams's correspondence meet with the same complaints during the Civil War; even at the time of the _Trent_ crisis, when for a fortnight Great Britain and the United States were living on the brink of war, Adams was kept entirely in the dark about the plans of Washington[2].

The letters of John Hay show a similar condition during his brief ambassadorship to Great Britain in 1897-1898[3].
But Mr.Bryan's incumbency was guilty of diplomatic vices which were peculiarly its own.

The "leaks" in the State Department, to which Page has already referred, were constantly taking place; the Ambassador would send the most confidential cipher dispatches to his superior, cautioning the Department that they must be held inviolably secret, and then he would pick up the London newspapers the next morning and find that everything had been cabled from Washington.