Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/24

22 wit, intellectual training, the qualities of a gentleman in every real sense, and the self-confidence that had been engendred by all these other qualities and experiences. As Mr. Roosevelt declared in 1916, Page was "an Ambassador who has represented America in London during these trying years as no other Ambassador in London has ever represented us with the exception of Charles Francis Adams during the Civil War."

When he the took the post in 1913, he could not have guessed that Great Britain would be plunged into the greatest World War of all history only a year later. It is always difficult to decide in any given case how much of an eminent man's fame is due to accidents of time and place. Dr. Eliot told me late in 1914 that if he could have known the Great War was to come, he would not have declined the Ambassadorship. If Elliot had accepted, it is obvious that Page's relation to public events would have been wholly different, however important. It was indeed a tragedy that the intense strain of the war period should have impaired his health and brought his death in the month following the armistice. If he had lived on for years, you would doubtless have enjoyed his presence as a fellow citizen and as a neighbor, and he would have found time, it may be supposed, for literary work of his own. If he had lived, however, there would not have come to light the remarkable private letters which at once gave him a new reputation that will be enduring; namely, that of a letter-writer of the highest order who might have shone as the most brilliant essayist of our generation.

But for certain obscure political controversies in the State of Missouri, Stephen A. Douglas would not have been forced to take a position at Washington that destroyed his chance to secure united support at the Charleston Convention of 1860. This accident in the career of Douglas, splitting the Democratic party, was one of a series of political accidents that brought Abraham Lincoln to the front. On at least three occasions of the most crucial sort in the career of Theodore Roosevelt, during the sixteen years from 1884 to 1900, the element of chance made the difference between a public career that led to the presidency and a career of some different character, however