"The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or to explain." This was another of those unfortunate sentences which made the President such an unsympathetic figure in the estimation of the Allies and seemed to indicate to them that he had no appreciation of the nature of the struggle.

Though this attitude of non-partisanship, of equal balance between the accusations of the Allies and Germany, was intended to make the President acceptable as a mediator, the practical result was exactly the reverse, for Allied statesmen turned from Wilson as soon as those sentences appeared in print.

The fact that this same oration specified the "freedom of the seas" as one of the foundation rocks of the proposed new settlement only accentuated this unfavourable attitude.
This then was clearly the "atmosphere" which prevailed in Washington at the time that Page was summoned home.

But Page's letters of this period indicate how little sympathy he entertained for such negotiations.

"It is quite apparent," he had recently written to Colonel House, "that nobody in Washington understands the war.