As the speech approached its end, this sentence appeared: "It must be a peace without victory." The words greatly puzzled the secretary in charge, for they seemed almost meaningless.

Suspecting that an error had been made in transmission, the secretary directed the code room to cable Washington for a verification of the cipher groups.

Very soon the answer was received; there had been no mistake; the Presidential words were precisely those which had been first received: "Peace without victory." The slips were then taken to Page, who read the document, especially these fateful syllables, with a consternation which he made no effort to conceal.

He immediately wrote a cable to President Wilson, telling him of the deplorable effect this sentence would produce and imploring him to cut it out of his speech--with what success the world now knows.
An astonishing feature of this episode is that Page had recently explained to the Foreign Office, in obedience to instructions from Washington, that Mr.Wilson's December note should not be interpreted as placing the Allies and the Central Powers on the same moral level.

Now Mr.Wilson, in this "peace without victory" phrase, had repeated practically the same idea in another form.