Page was taking a brief holiday with his son Frank in Rowsley,
Derbyshire, when this news came. It was telegraphed from the Embassy.

"That settles it," he said to his son. "They have sunk the _Arabic_.
That means that we shall break with Germany and I've got to go back to
London."

_To Edward M. House_

American Embassy, London, August 23, 1915.

DEAR HOUSE:

The sinking of the _Arabic_ is the answer to the President and to
your letter to me. And there'll be more such answers. You said to
me one day after you had got back from your last visit to Berlin:
"They are impossible." I think you told the truth, and surely you
know your German and you know your Berlin--or you did know them
when you were here.

The question is not what we have done for the Allies, not what any
other neutral country has done or has failed to do--such
comparisons, I think, are far from the point. The question is when
the right moment arrives for us to save our self-respect, our
honour, and the esteem and fear (or the contempt) in which the
world will hold us.

Berlin has the Napoleonic disease. If you follow Napoleon's
career--his excuses, his evasions, his inventions, the wild French
enthusiasm and how he kept it up--you will find an exact parallel.