Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WAR-TIME ACTIVITIES To Sir Cecil Spring-rice 1 London, England August 30, 1914 Dear Springy : The day you left here I went down to Speyer Bros, and found them perfectly willing to transfer money to their Frankfort or Berlin houses, provided that the British Government and the German Government both consented. This plan proved too cumbersome, but in the end money was sent through by the British Government to Gerard2 for the relief of British subjects. We were able to send the British subscriptions to the Gerard Fund in the care of Julius Lay, just appointed American Consul-General at Berlin. By the way,Lay has just come from Rio by way of Per- nambuco. He and his wife came here on board a British vessel which was held up en route by a German cruiser; for some reason, however, the Germans allowed the vessel to proceed. 1 Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador to the United States, at this time and until 1918. He died in 1918. 2 Hon. J. W. Gerard, American Ambassador to Germany. I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Page's1 judgment and tact. It seems to me that some day or other he ought to be useful acting as intermediary for peace negotiations. Of course, there can be no thought of peace at present, but the time is pretty sure to come, and may come sooner than we expect, when a movement for peace suggested from the outside will be reasonably welcomed in the same way that Roosevelt's movement was welcomed in the Russian -Japanese War. As the United States is about the only nation of any account that is not involved in this war, directly or indirectly, it looks to me as if President Wilson might find himself in much thesame position that President Roosevelt was in when the Treaty of Peace was concluded at Portsmouth. 1 Hon. Walter H. Page, Amer...