After the concert began, I left the Presidential box and, following a habit I had acquired since coming to the Executive offices, I conferred with the newspaper men in our party, endeavouring to obtain from them, without expressing any personal opinion of my own, just how they felt toward the terms proposed in the Max note. I then called up the State Department and discussed the note with Mr. Polk, expressing the same opinion to him that I had already expressed to the President, to the effect that we could not accept a German offer which came to us under the auspices of the Hohenzollerns. Upon the conclusion of the concert, we left the Metropolitan Opera House, I accompanying the President to the Waldorf. As I took my place in the automobile, the President leaned over to Mrs. Wilson and whispered to her the news of the receipt of the German note. Then, turning to me, he said: "Have you had any new reaction on the note since I last talked with you?" I told him I had not, but that what I had learned since talking with him earlier in the evening had only confirmed me in the opinion that I had already expressed, that it would not be right or safe for us to accept the German proposals. When we arrived at the Waldorf it was 12:30 A. M. and the President asked me to his rooms, and there, for an hour and a half, we indulged in a long discussion of the German offer. As was usual with the President in all these important matters, his mind was, to use his own phrase, "open and to let." I emphasized the idea that we could not consider a peace proposal in which the Kaiser and his brood played a part, and that the only proffer we could consider must come from the German people themselves; that in his Mexican policy he had proclaimed the doctrine that no ruler who came to power by murder or assassination would ever receive the recognition of the United States; that we must broaden the morality which underlay this policy, and by our attitude say to the European rulers who started this war, that guilt is personal and that until they had purged themselves from the responsibility of war, we could not consider any terms of peace that came through them. The next day the President left for Cleveland Dodge's home on the Hudson, with Colonel House and Doctor Grayson. I remained in New York at the Knickerbocker Hotel, busily engaged in poring over the newspaper files to find out what the editorial attitude of the country was toward the German proposal of peace, and in preparing a brief on the whole matter for the President's consideration. Before Colonel House left, I again impressed upon him my view of the note and my conviction that it would be a disastrous blunder for us to accept it.