Chapter II (1)

The spirit that was Peace seems but a wraith,
The glory that was ours seems but a name,
And like a rotten reed our broken faith,
Our boasted virtue turned to scarlet shame
By the low, envious lust of party power;
While he upon the heights whence he had led,
Deserted and betrayed in victory's hour,
Still wears a victor's wreath on unbowed head.
The Nation gropes--his rule is at an end,
Immortal man of the transcendent mind,
Light-bearer of the world, the loving friend
Of little peoples, servant of mankind!
O land of mine! how long till you atone?
How long to stand dishonored and alone?

_To Woodrow Wilson, March 4, 1921._

Make firm, O God, the peace our dead have won,
For folly shakes the tinsel on her head
And points us back to darkness and to hell,
Cackling, "Beware of Visions," while our dead
Still cry, "It was for visions that we fell."

--Alfred Noyes]

_Workmen's Compensation_

We must hearten and quicken the spirit and efficiency of labor
throughout our whole industrial system by everywhere and in all
occupations doing justice to the laborer, not only by paying a
living wage but also by making all the conditions that surround
labor what they ought to be. And we must do more than justice. We
must safeguard life and promote health and safety in every
occupation in which they are threatened or imperiled. That is more
than justice, and better, because it is humanity and
economy.--_From President Wilson's Speech of Acceptance at Shadow
Lawn, September 2, 1916._

_Woodrow Wilson's Place in History_

_By General the Right Honorable Jan Christian Smuts, Premier of
the Union of South Africa_

General the Right Honorable Jan Christian Smuts, premier of the
Union of South Africa, served with President Wilson on the League
of Nations commission of the peace conference.

Gen. Smuts was an active leader of the Boer Army in the field in
the Boer war. He is a graduate of Cambridge University in England,
served as state attorney for the South African Republic, and was
known as a member of the bar at Cape Town.

Accepting the outcome of the Boer war, he entered the service of
the British Government, becoming colonial secretary for the
Transvaal in 1907 and exercising a leading influence as a delegate
in the national convention in 1910, which drew up the constitution
for the present Union of South Africa. He was minister of the
defense of the South African Government and commanded the troops in
the campaign against the Germans in East Africa in 1916-17.
Promoted to be an honorary lieutenant-general, he was the South
African representative in the imperial war cabinet in 1917-18. This
led to his prominence in the peace conference and to his close
contact with President Wilson. On February 8, of this year, Premier
Smuts and the South African party won a decisive victory at the
polls over Gen. Hertzog and those who advocated the secession of
South Africa from the British Empire.

WRITTEN FOR THE NEW YORK EVENING POST AND THE WASHINGTON HERALD

_Pretoria, South Africa, January 8, 1921._

It has been suggested that I should write a short estimate and appraisal of the work of President Wilson on the termination of his Presidency of the United States of America. I feel I must comply with the suggestion. I feel I may not remain silent when there is an opportunity to say a word of appreciation for the work of one with whom I came into close contact at a great period and who rendered the most signal service to the great human cause.

There is a great saying of Mommsen (I believe) in reference to the close of Hannibal's career in failure and eclipse: "On those whom the gods love they lavish infinite joys and infinite sorrows." It has come back to my mind in reference to the close of Wilson's career. For a few brief moments he was not only the leader of the greatest State in the world; he was raised to far giddier heights and became the center of the world's hopes. And then he fell, misunderstood and rejected by his own people, and his great career closes apparently in signal and tragic defeat.

_Position of Terrible Greatness_

What is the explanation for this tremendous tragedy, which is not solely American, which closely concerns the whole world? Of course, there are purely American elements in the explanation which I am not competent to speak on. But besides the American quarrel with President Wilson there is something to be said on the great matters in issue. On these I may be permitted to say a few words.

The position occupied by President Wilson in the world's imagination at the close of the great war and at the beginning of the peace conference was terrible in its greatness. It was a terrible position for any mere man to occupy. Probably to no human being in all history did the hopes, the prayers, the aspirations of many millions of his fellows turn with such poignant intensity as to him at the close of the war. At a time of the deepest darkness and despair, he had raised aloft a light to which all eyes had turned. He had spoken divine words of healing and consolation to a broken humanity. His lofty moral idealism seemed for a moment to dominate the brutal passions which had torn the Old World asunder. And he was supposed to possess the secret which would remake the world on fairer lines. The peace which Wilson was bringing to the world was expected to be God's peace. Prussianism lay crushed; brute force had failed utterly. The moral character of the universe had been signally vindicated. There was a universal vague hope in a great moral peace, of a new world order arising visibly and immediately on the ruins of the old. This hope was not a mere superficial sentiment. It was the intense expression at the end of the war of the inner moral and spiritual force which had upborne the peoples during the dark night of the war and had nerved them in an effort almost beyond human strength. Surely, God had been with them in that long night of agony. His was the victory; His should be the peace. And President Wilson was looked upon as the man to make this great peace. He had voiced the great ideals of the new order; his great utterances had become the contractual basis for the armistice and the peace. The idealism of Wilson would surely become the reality of the new order of things in the peace treaty.

_Saved the "Little Child"_

In this atmosphere of extravagant, almost frenzied expectation he arrived at the Paris Peace Conference. Without hesitation he plunged into that inferno of human passions. He went down into the Pit like a second Heracles to bring back the fair Alcestis of the world's desire. There were six months of agonized waiting, during which the world situation rapidly deteriorated. And then he emerged with the peace treaty. It was not a Wilson peace, and he made a fatal mistake in somehow giving the impression that the peace was in accord with his Fourteen Points and his various declarations. Not so the world had understood him. This was a punic peace, the same sort of peace as the victor had dictated to the vanquished for thousands of years. It was not Alcestis; it was a haggard, unlovely woman with features distorted with hatred, greed and selfishness, and the little child that the woman carried was scarcely noticed. Yet it was for the saving of the child that Wilson had labored until he was a physical wreck. Let our other great statesmen and leaders enjoy their well-earned honors for their unquestioned success at Paris. To Woodrow Wilson, the apparent failure, belongs the undying honor, which will grow with the growing centuries, of having saved the "little child that shall lead them yet." No other statesman but Wilson could have done it. And he did it.

_People Did Not Understand_

The people, the common people of all lands, did not understand the significance of what had happened. They saw only that hard, unlovely Prussian peace, and the great hope died in their hearts. The great disillusionment took its place. The most receptive mood for a new start the world had been in for centuries passed away. Faith in their governors and leaders was largely destroyed and the foundations of the human government were shaken in a way which will be felt for generations. The Paris peace lost an opportunity as unique as the great war itself. In destroying the moral idealism born of the sacrifices of the war it did almost as much as the war itself in shattering the structure of Western civilization.

And the odium for all this fell especially on President Wilson. Round him the hopes had centered; round him the disillusion and despair now gathered. Popular opinion largely held him responsible for the bitter disappointment and grievous failure. The cynics scoffed; his friends were silenced in the universal disappointment. Little or nothing had been expected from the other leaders; the whole failure was put to the account of Woodrow Wilson. And finally America for reasons of her own joined the pack and at the end it was his own people who tore him to pieces.

_Must Wait for Judgment_

Will this judgment, born of momentary disillusion and disappointment, stand in future, or will it be reversed? The time has not come to pass final judgment on either Wilson or any of the other great actors in the drama at Paris. The personal estimates will depend largely on the interpretation of that drama in the course of time. As one who saw and watched things from the inside, I feel convinced that the present popular estimates are largely superficial and will not stand the searching test of time. And I have no doubt whatever that Wilson has been harshly, unfairly, unjustly dealt with, and that he has been made a scapegoat for the sins of others. Wilson made mistakes, and there were occasions when I ventured to sound a warning note. But it was not his mistakes that caused the failure for which he has been held mainly responsible.

Let us admit the truth, however bitter it is to do so, for those who believe in human nature. It was not Wilson who failed. The position is far more serious. It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results.

_Says Humanity Failed_

It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle.

Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them. The hope, the aspiration for a new world order of peace and right and justice--however deeply and universally felt--was still only feeble and ineffective in comparison with the dominant national passions which found their expression in the peace treaty. Even if Wilson had been one of the great demi-gods of the human race, he could not have saved the peace. Knowing the Peace Conference as I knew it from within, I feel convinced in my own mind that not the greatest man born of woman in the history of the race would have saved that situation. The great hope was not the heralding of the coming dawn, as the peoples thought, but only a dim intimation of some far-off event toward which we shall yet have to make many a long, weary march. Sincerely as we believed in the moral ideals for which he had fought, the temptation at Paris of a large booty to be divided proved too great. And in the end not only the leaders but the peoples preferred a bit of booty here, a strategic frontier there, a coal field or an oil well, an addition to their population or their resources--to all the faint allurements of the ideal. As I said at the time, the real peace was still to come, and it could only come from a new spirit in the peoples themselves.

_Wilson Had to Be Conciliated_

What was really saved at Paris was the child--the covenant of the League of Nations. The political realists who had their eye on the loot were prepared--however reluctantly--to throw up that innocent little sop to President Wilson and his fellow idealists. After all, there was not much harm in it, it threatened no present national interest, and it gave great pleasure to a number of good unpractical people in most countries. Above all, President Wilson had to be conciliated, and this was the last and the greatest of the fourteen points on which he had set his heart and by which he was determined to stand or fall. And so he got his way. But it is a fact that only a man of his great power and influence and dogged determination could have carried the covenant through that Peace Conference. Others had seen with him the great vision; others had perhaps given more thought to the elaboration of the great plan. But his was the power and the will that carried it through. The covenant is Wilson's souvenir to the future of the world. No one will ever deny that honor.

_Great Creative Document_

The honor is very great, indeed, for the covenant is one of the great creative documents of human history. The peace treaty will fade into merciful oblivion and its provisions will be gradually obliterated by the great human tides sweeping over the world. But the covenant will stand as sure as fate. Forty-two nations gathered round it at the first meeting of the League at Geneva. And the day is not far off when all the free peoples of the world will gather around it. It must succeed, because there is no other way for the future of civilization. It does not realize the great hopes born of the war, but it provides the only method and instrument by which in the course of time those hopes can be realized. Speaking as one who has some right to speak on the fundamental conceptions, objects and methods of the covenant, I feel sure that most of the present criticism is based on misunderstandings. These misunderstandings will clear away, one by one the peoples still outside the covenant will fall in behind this banner, under which the human race is going to march forward to triumphs of peaceful organization and achievements undreamt of by us children of an unhappier era. And the leader who, in spite of apparent failure, succeeded in inscribing his name on that banner has achieved the most enviable and enduring immortality. Americans of the future will yet proudly and gratefully rank him with Washington and Lincoln, and his name will have a more universal significance than theirs.

"We die without distinction if we are not willing to die the death
of sacrifice. Do you covet honor? You will never get it by serving
yourself. Do you covet distinction? You will get it only as a
servant of mankind."

--Woodrow Wilson's Address
at Swarthmore College
Oct. 5, 1913.]

_Woodrow Wilson_

AN INTERPRETATION

PUBLISHED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK _World_

No other American has made so much world history as Woodrow Wilson, who retires at noon today from the office of President of the United States. No other American has ever bulked so large in the affairs of civilization or wielded so commanding an influence in shaping their ends.

The great outstanding figure of the war, Mr. Wilson remains the great outstanding figure of the peace. Broken in health and shattered in body, Mr. Wilson is leaving the White House, but his spirit still dominates the scene. It pervades every chancellery in Europe. It hovers over every capital. Because Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States during the most critical period of modern history international relations have undergone their first far-reaching moral revolution.

Mr. Harding is assuming the duties of the Presidency, but the main interest in Mr. Harding is still a reflected interest, which is concerned chiefly with the efforts that his Administration may make to adjust itself to the forces that Mr. Wilson has set in motion. Stripped of all the paraphernalia of his office, Mr. Wilson, by virtue of his achievements, remains the most potent single influence in the modern world; yet after this eight years in the White House it may be doubted if even the American people themselves know him better or understand him better than they did the day he was first inaugurated.

Neither Mr. Wilson's friends nor his enemies have ever succeeded in interpreting him or in explaining him, nor can any interpretation or explanation be satisfactory which fails at the outset to recognize in him the simplest and at the same time the most complex character in the greatest drama ever played on the stage of human history. Even his closest associates have never found it easy to reconcile a fervent political democracy with an unbending intellectual aristocracy, or to determine which of those characteristics was dominant in his day-to-day decisions.

No man ever sat in the President's chair who was more genuinely a democrat or held more tenaciously to his faith in democracy than Woodrow Wilson, but no other man ever sat in the President's chair who was so contemptuous of all intellect that was inferior to his own or so impatient with its laggard processes.

_A President Who Dealt in Ideas_

Mr. Wilson was a President who dealt almost exclusively in ideas. He cared little or nothing about political organization and rarely consulted the managing politicians of his party. When they conferred with him it was usually at their request and not at his request. Patronage hardly entered into his calculations as an agency of government. He disliked to be troubled about appointments, and when he had filled an office he was likely to be indifferent as to the manner in which that office was subsequently administered, unless his own measures were antagonized or his policies obstructed.

No man was ever more impersonal in his attitude toward government, and that very impersonality was the characteristic which most baffled the American people. Mr. Wilson had a genius for the advocacy of great principles, but he had no talent whatever for advocating himself, and to a country that is accustomed to think in headlines about political questions his subtlety of mind and his careful, precise style of expression were quite as likely to be an obstacle to the communication of thought as a medium for the communication of thought. That is how such phrases as "too proud to fight" and "peace without victory" were successfully wrested from their context by his critics and twisted into a fantastic distortion of their true meaning.

Mr. Wilson was likewise totally deficient in the art of advertising, and advertising is the very breath of American politics. He held himself aloof from all these points of public contact. _The World's_ relations with him have certainly been as close and intimate as those of any other newspaper; yet during the eight years in which Mr. Wilson has been in the White House he never sought a favor from _The World_, he never asked for support either for himself or any of his policies, he never complained when he was criticised, he never offered to explain himself or his attitude on any issue of government. In the troublesome days of his Administration he often expressed his gratitude for services that _The World_ had rendered in the interpretation of his policies, but he never solicited such interpretation or took measures to facilitate it. He was an eloquent pleader for the principles in which he believed, but he had no faculty whatever for projecting himself into the picture.

_The Experience of History_

Mr. Wilson's enemies are fond of calling him a theorist, but there is little of the theorist about him, otherwise he could never have made more constructive history than any other man of his generation. What are commonly called theories in his case were the practical application of the experience of history to the immediate problems of government, and in the experience of history Mr. Wilson is an expert. With the exception of James Madison, who was called "the Father of the Constitution," Mr. Wilson is the most profound student of government among all the Presidents, and he had what Madison conspicuously lacked, which was the faculty to translate his knowledge of government into the administration of government.

When Mr. Wilson was elected President he had reached the conclusion which most unprejudiced students of American government eventually arrive at--that the system of checks and balances is unworkable in practice and that the legislative and executive branches cannot be in fact coördinate, independent departments. Other Presidents have acted on that hypothesis without daring to admit it, and endeavored to control Congress by patronage and by threats. Mr. Wilson without any formality established himself as the leader of his party in Congress, Premier as well as President, and the originator of the party's program of legislation.

Senators and Representatives denounced him as an autocrat and a dictator. Congress was described as the President's rubber stamp, but Mr. Wilson established something that more nearly resembled responsible government than anything that had gone before, and Congress under his direct leadership made a record for constructive legislation for which there is no parallel. It was due to this kind of leadership that such measures as the Federal Reserve Banking Law were enacted, which later proved to be the one bulwark between the American people and a financial panic of tragic proportions.

But Mr. Wilson's domestic policies in spite of their magnitude have been obscured by his foreign policies. Had there been no war, these policies in themselves would have given to the Wilson Administration a place in American history higher than that of any other since the Civil War. What some of his predecessors talked about doing he did, and he accomplished it by the process of making himself the responsible leader of his party in Congress--a process that is simple enough but capable of fulfillment only in the hands of a man with an extraordinary capacity for imposing his will on his associates. Mr. Wilson's control over Congress for six years was once described as the most impressive triumph of mind over matter known to American politics.

_Mr. Wilson's Foreign Policies_

When we begin the consideration of Mr. Wilson's foreign policies we are entering one of the most remarkable chapters in all history, and one which will require the perspective of history for a true judgment.

The first step in the development of these foreign policies came in Mr. Wilson's refusal to recognize Huerta, who had participated in the plot to murder President Madero and made himself the dictator of Mexico by reason of this assassination. The crime was committed during Mr. Taft's Administration. When Mr. Wilson came into office he served notice that there would be no recognition of Huerta and no recognition of any Mexican Government which was not established by due process of law.

What was plainly in Mr. Wilson's mind was a determination to end political assassination in Latin America as a profitable industry, and compel recognition, to some extent at least, of democratic principles and constitutional forms. On this issue he had to face the intense opposition of all the financial interests in the United States which had Mexican holdings, and a consolidated European opposition as well. Every dollar of foreign money invested in Mexico was confident that what Mexico needed most was such a dictatorship as that of Huerta or American intervention. Mr. Wilson's problem was to get rid of Huerta without involving the United States in war, and then by steady pressure bring about the establishment of a responsible government that rested on something at least resembling the consent of the governed. Only a statesman of high ideals would ever have attempted it, and only a statesman of almost infinite patience would have been able to adhere to the task that Mr. Wilson set for himself.

Mexico is not yet a closed incident, but Mr. Wilson's policy has been vindicated in principle. For the first time since Mr. Roosevelt shocked the moral sense and aroused the political resentment of all the Latin-American states by the rape of Panama, faith in the integrity and friendship of the United States has been restored among the other nations of the Western Hemisphere.

Of equal or even greater ethical importance was Mr. Wilson's insistence on the repeal of the Panama Canal Tolls Act, which discriminated in favor of American ships in spite of the plain provisions of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty. This was the more creditable on Mr. Wilson's part because he himself had been tricked during the campaign into giving his support to this measure. When he began to perceive the diplomatic consequences of this treaty violation Mr. Wilson reversed himself and demanded that Congress reverse itself. Had he done otherwise, the American people would have had scant opportunity to protest against the German perfidy which turned a treaty into "a scrap of paper."

When Germany, at the beginning of August, 1914, declared war successively on Russia, France and Belgium, thereby bringing Great Britain into the most stupendous conflict of all the centuries, Mr. Wilson did what every President has done when other nations have gone to war. He issued a proclamation of neutrality. He then went further, however, than any of his predecessors had done and urged the American people to be not only neutral in deed but "impartial in thought." Mr. Wilson has been severely criticised for this appeal. The more violent pro-Germans and the more violent pro-French and pro-British regarded it as a personal insult and an attempt on the part of the President to stifle what they were pleased to regard as their conscience.

Mr. Wilson asked the American people to be impartial in thought because he knew as a historian the danger that threatened if the country were to be divided into two hostile camps, the one blindly and unreasoningly applauding every act of the Germans and the other blindly and unreasoningly applauding every act of the Allies. In the early years of his life the Republic was all but wrecked by the emotional and political excesses of the pro-French Americans and the pro-British Americans in the war that followed the French Revolution. The warning against a passionate attachment to the interests of other nations which is embodied in Washington's Farewell Address was the first President's solemn admonition against the evils of a divided allegiance. Mr. Wilson had no desire to see the country drift into a similar situation in which American rights, American interests and American prestige would all be sacrificed to gratify the American adherents of the various European belligerents. Moreover, he understood far better than his critics that issues would soon arise between the belligerents and the United States which would require on the part of the American people that impartiality of thought that is demanded of the just and upright judge. He knew that the American people might ultimately become the final arbiters of the issues of the conflict.

The United States was the only great nation outside the sphere of conflict. It was the only great nation that had no secret diplomatic understandings with either set of belligerents. It was the only great nation that was in a position to uphold the processes of international law and to use its good offices as a mediator when the opportunity arose.

For two years Mr. Wilson genuinely believed that it would be possible for the United States to fulfill this mission, and he never fully lost hope until that day in January, 1917, when the German Government wantonly wrecked all the informal peace negotiations that were then in progress and decided to stake the fate of the empire on a single throw of the U-boat dice.

_A United Country First_

Mr. Wilson perceived quite as quickly and quite as early as anybody the possibility that the United States would be drawn into the war, but he perceived also what most of his critics failed to perceive, that the immediate danger of the country was not war but a divided people. While he was engaging in framing the first Lusitania note he discussed the situation with one of his callers at the White House in words that have since proved prophetic:

I do not know whether the German Government intends to keep faith
with the United States or not. It is my personal opinion that
Germany has no such intention, but I am less concerned about the
ultimate intentions of Germany than about the attitude of the
American people, who are already divided into three groups: those
who are strongly pro-German, those who are strongly pro-Ally, and
the vast majority who expect me to find a way to keep the United
States out of war. I do not want war, yet I do not know that I can
keep the country out of the war. That depends on Germany, and I
have no control over Germany. _But I intend to handle this
situation in such a manner that every American citizen will know
that the United States Government has done everything it could to
prevent war. Then if war comes we shall have a united country, and
with a united country there need be no fear about the result._

Mr. Wilson's policy from that day to April 2, 1917, must be read in the light of those words. He plunged forthwith into that extraordinary debate with the German Government over the submarine issue--the most momentous debate ever held--but he was only incidentally addressing himself to the rulers of Germany. He was talking to the conscience of the civilized world, but primarily to the conscience of the United States, explaining, clarifying, elucidating the issue. His reluctance to countenance any extensive measures of preparedness was the product of a definite resolution not to give Germany and her American supporters an opportunity to declare that the United States, while these issues were pending, was arming for war against the Imperial Government.

When Mr. Wilson began this debate he knew something which his critics did not know and which for reasons of state he did not choose to tell them. Weeks before the destruction of the Lusitania two-thirds of the German General Staff were in favor of war with the United States as a military measure in the interest of Germany. They were under the spell of Tirpitz. They believed that the submarine could do all that the Grand Admiral said it could do. They argued that inasmuch as the Allies were borrowing money in the United States, obtaining food from the United States and purchasing great quantities of munitions in the United States Germany, by restricting submarine warfare in answer to American protests, was paying an excessive price for what was in effect a fictitious neutrality. In their opinion the United States as a neutral was already doing more for the Allies than it could do as an active belligerent if free scope were given to the U-boats. The American Navy, they said, could be safely disregarded, because with Germany already blockaded by the British Navy, and the German Grand Fleet penned in, the addition of the American Navy, or a dozen navies for that matter, would make little difference in respect to the actual facts of sea power. On the other hand there was not enough shipping available to feed the Allies and enable the United States to send an army to Europe. If the United States tried to provide troops, the British would starve. If the United States could not send troops, Germany would be just as well off with the United States in the war as out of the war, and would have the priceless additional advantage of being able to employ her submarines as she saw fit, regardless of the technicalities of international law.

In the fall of 1916 Mr. Wilson decided definitely that the relations between the United States and Germany were approaching a climax. If the war continued much longer the United States would inevitably be drawn in. There was no prospect of a decision. The belligerent armies were deadlocked. Unwilling to wait longer for events, Mr. Wilson made up his mind that he would demand from each side a statement of its aims and objects and compel each side to plead its own cause before the court of the public opinion of the world. This was done on December 18, 1916, in a joint note which was so cold and dispassionate in its terms that its import was hardly understood.

_With Clean Hands_

The President said that the aims and objects of the war on both sides "as stated in general terms to their own people and the world" seemed to be "virtually the same," and he asked for a bill of particulars. Instantly there was wild turmoil and recrimination on the part of the Allies and their friends in the United States.

The President had declared, they said, that the Germans and the Allies were fighting for the same thing. Mr. Wilson had expressed no opinion of his own one way or the other and the obvious discovery was soon made in London and Paris that the President had given to the Allies the opportunity which they needed of officially differentiating their war aims from those of the Germans. The German Government missed its opportunity completely, and by their own answer to the President's note the Allies succeeded in consolidating their moral positions, which was something they had never previously been able to do in spite of all their propaganda.

Informal peace negotiations were still in progress, although conducted in secret and carefully screened from the knowledge of all peoples involved in the conflict. On January 22, 1917, Mr. Wilson made his last attempt at mediation in the "peace without victory" address to the Senate in which he defined what he regarded as the fundamental conditions of a permanent peace. Most of the basic principles of this address were afterward incorporated into the Fourteen Points. Here again Mr. Wilson was the victim of his own precision of language and of the settled policy of his critics of reading into his public utterances almost everything except what he actually said. He himself has insisted on giving his own interpretation of "peace without victory," and this interpretation was instantly rejected by the super-patriots who regarded themselves as the sole custodians of all the issues of the war.

_The President and the Treaty_

_President Wilson sails for Europe, December 4, 1918._

_Visits to England, France and Italy, December-January, 1918-19._

_Peace Conference opened, January 18, 1919._

_League Covenant adopted, February 14, 1919._

_President Wilson's trip home, February 24-March 5, 1919._

_The treaty signed, June 28, 1919._

_Submission to the Senate, July 10, 1919._

_The President's speaking tour, September 3-26, 1919._

_Adoption of the Lodge reservations, November 16, 1919._

_Final defeat of the treaty in the Senate, March 20, 1920._

TWO PICTURES

By Joseph P. Tumulty

_Two pictures are in my mind. First, the Hall of Representatives
crowded from floor to gallery with expectant throngs. Presently it
is announced that the President of the United States will address
Congress. There steps out to the Speaker's desk a straight,
vigorous, slender man, active and alert. He is sixty years of age,
but he looks not more than forty-five, so lithe of limb, so alert
of bearing, so virile. It is Woodrow Wilson reading his great war
message. The other picture is only three and a half years later.
There is a parade of Veterans of the Great War. They are to be
reviewed by the President on the east terrace of the White House.
In a chair sits a man, your President, broken in health, but still
alert in mind. His hair is white, his shoulders bowed, his figure
bent. He is sixty-three years old, but he looks older. It is
Woodrow Wilson. Presently, in the procession there appears an
ambulance laden with wounded soldiers, the maimed, the halt and the
blind. As they pass they salute, slowly reverently. The President's
right hand goes up in answering salute. I glanced at him. There
were tears in his eyes. The wounded is greeting the wounded; those
in the ambulance, he in the chair, are alike, casualties of the
Great War._

_From address by Joseph P. Tumulty_
_Thursday, Oct. 28, 1920_

When the armistice was signed one of the most eminent of living British statesmen gave it as his opinion that the war had lasted two years too long, and that the task of salvaging an enduring peace from the wreck had become well-nigh insuperable. It will always be one of the fascinating riddles of history to guess what the result would have been if Mr. Wilson's final proposals for mediation had been accepted. The United States would not have entered the war, and a less violent readjustment of the internal affairs of Europe would probably have resulted. There would have been no Bolshevist revolution in Russia and no economic collapse of Europe. Nor is it certain that most of the really enduring benefits of the Treaty of Versailles could not have been as well obtained by negotiation as they were finally obtained through a military victory which cost a price that still staggers humanity.

Be that as it may, the German Government, now fighting to maintain the dynasty and the Junker domination, took the issue out of Mr. Wilson's hands. Ten days after his "peace without victory" address the German autocracy put into effect its cherished programme of ruthless submarine warfare. The only possible answer on the part of the United States was the dismissal of Count von Bernstorff the German Ambassador, and from that time war between the United States and Germany was only a matter of days. But Mr. Wilson had achieved the great purpose that he had formulated two years before. He had been balked in his efforts at mediation, but he had united the American people on the issues of the conflict. He had demonstrated to them that their Government had exerted every honorable means to avoid war and that its hands were clean. There was no uncertainty in their own minds that the responsibility for the war rested solely on Germany, and Mr. Wilson now purposed to write the terms of peace with the sword.

_A Call to a Crusade_

Mr. Wilson's War Address on the night of April 2, 1917, was the most dramatic event that the National Capitol had ever known. In the presence of both branches of Congress, of the Supreme Court, of the Cabinet and of the Diplomatic Corps, Mr. Wilson summoned the American people not to a war but to a crusade in words that instantaneously captivated the imagination of the Nation:

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for
the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for
democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a
voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of
small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert
of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and
make the world at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our
lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that
we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come
when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the
principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which
she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

This was not Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual aristocrat, who was speaking, but Woodrow Wilson, the fervent democrat, proclaiming a new declaration of independence to the embattled peoples.

No sooner had Congress declared war than Mr. Wilson proceeded to mobilize all the resources of the Nation and throw them into the conflict. This war was different from any other war in which the United States had ever engaged, not only by reason of its magnitude but by reason of the necessity for coördinating American military plans with the military plans of the Allies. The Allies were not quite agreed as to what they desired of the United States, aside from unlimited financial assistance, and the solution of the general problem depended more or less on the trend of events.

The test of any war policy is its success, and it is a waste of time to enter into a vindication of the manner in which the Wilson Administration made war, or to trouble about the accusations of waste and extravagance, as if war were an economic process which could be carried on prudently and frugally. The historian is not likely to devote serious attention to the partisan accusations relating to Mr. Wilson's conduct of the war, but he will find it interesting to record the manner in which the President brought his historical knowledge to bear in shaping the war policies of the country.

The voluntary system and the draft system had both been discredited in the Civil War, so Mr. Wilson demanded a Selective-Service Act under which the country could raise 10,000,000 troops, if 10,000,000 troops were needed, without deranging its essential industries. It had taken Mr. Lincoln three years to find a General whom he could intrust with the command of the Union armies. Mr. Wilson picked his Commander in Chief before he went to war and then gave to Gen. Pershing the same kind of ungrudging support that Mr. Lincoln gave to Gen. Grant. The Civil War had been financed by greenbacks and bond issues peddled by bankers. Mr. Wilson called on the American people to finance their own war, and they unhesitatingly responded. In the war with Spain the commissary system had broken down completely owing to the antiquated methods that were employed. No other army in time of war was ever so well fed or so well cared for as that of the United States in the conflict with Germany.

_Wilson as a War President_

Mistakes there were in plenty, both in methods and in the choice of men, and errors of judgment and the shortcomings that always result from a lack of experience, but the impartial verdict of history must be that when everything is set forth on the debit side of the balance sheet which can be set forth Mr. Wilson remains the most vigorous of all the war Presidents. Yet it is also true that history will concern itself far less with Mr. Wilson as a war President than with Mr. Wilson as a peace-making President. It is around him as a peace-making President that all the passions and prejudices and disappointments of the world still rage.

Mr. Wilson in his "peace without victory" address to the Senate previous to the entrance of the United States into the war had sketched a general plan of a coöperative peace. "I am proposing, as it were," he said, "that the nations with one accord should adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world." He returned to the subject again in his War Address, in which he defined the principles for which the United States was to fight and the principles on which an enduring peace could be made. The time came when it was necessary to be still more specific.

In the winter of 1918 the morale of the Allies was at its lowest ebb. Russia had passed into the hands of the Bolsheviki and was preparing to make a separate peace with Germany. There was widespread discontent in Italy, and everywhere in Europe soldiers and civilians were asking one another what they were really fighting for. On January 8 Mr. Wilson went before Congress and delivered the address which contained the Fourteen Points of peace, a message which was greeted both in the United States and in Europe as a veritable Magna Charta of the nations. Mr. Wilson had again become the spokesman of the aspirations of mankind, and from the moment that this address was delivered the thrones of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs ceased to be stable.

Ten months later they were to crumble and collapse. Before the armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, Mr. Wilson had overthrown the doctrine of Divine right in Europe. The Hapsburgs ran away. The Kaiser was compelled to abdicate and take refuge in exile, justifying his flight by the explanation that Wilson would not make peace with Germany while a Hohenzollern was on the throne. This was the climax of Mr. Wilson's power and influence and, strangely enough, it was the dawn of his own day of disaster.

For nearly six years Mr. Wilson had manipulated the Government of the United States with a skill that was almost uncanny. He had turned himself from a minority President into a majority President. He had so deftly outmanoeuvred all his opponents in Congress and out of Congress that they had nothing with which to console themselves except their intensive hatred of the man and all that pertained to him. Then at the very summit of his career he made his first fatal blunder.

Every President in the off-year election urges the election of a Congress of his own party. That is part of the routine of politics, and during the campaign of 1918 Mr. Wilson's advisers urged him to follow the precedent. What they forgot and he forgot was that it was no time for partisan precedents, and he allowed his distrust of the Republican leaders in Congress to sweep him into an inexcusable error that he, of all men, should have avoided. The Sixty-fifth Congress was anything but popular. The Western farmers were aggrieved because the price of wheat had been regulated and the price of cotton had not. The East was greatly dissatisfied with the war taxes, which it regarded as an unfair discrimination, and it remembered Mr. Kitchin's boast that the North wanted the war and the North would have to pay for it. There was general complaint from business interests against the Southern Democratic control of the legislative department, and all this sentiment instantly crystallized when the President asked for another Democratic Congress. Republicans who were loyally supporting the Administration in all its war activities were justly incensed that a party issue had been raised. A Republican Congress was elected and by inference the President sustained a personal defeat.

Misfortunes did not come singly in Mr. Wilson's case. Following the mistake of appealing for the election of a Democratic Congress he made an equally serious mistake in the selection of his Peace Commission.

To anybody who knows Mr. Wilson, who knows Mr. Lloyd George, who knows Mr. Clemenceau, nothing could be sillier than the chapters of Keynes and Dillon in which they undertake to picture the President's unfitness to cope with the European masters of diplomacy. Mr. Wilson for years had been playing with European masters of diplomacy as a cat plays with a mouse. To assume that Mr. Wilson was ever deceived by the transparent tactics of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Clemenceau is to assume the impossible. It would be as easy to conceive of his being tricked and bamboozled by the United States Senate.

_The Peace Commission_

Mr. Wilson needed strong Republican representation on the Peace Commission not to reinforce him in his struggles with his adversaries at Paris but to divide with him the responsibility for a treaty of peace that was doomed in advance to be a disappointment. Although the popular sentiment of Europe was almost passionate in its advocacy of President Wilson's peace program, all the special interests that were seeking to capitalize the peace for their own advantage or profit were actively at work and were beginning to swing all the influence that they could command on their various Governments. It was inevitable from the outset that Mr. Wilson could never get the peace that he had expected. The treaty was bound to be a series of compromises that would satisfy nobody, and when Mr. Wilson assumed all the responsibility for it in advance he assumed a responsibility that no stateman who had ever lived could carry alone. Had he taken Mr. Root or Mr. Taft or both of them with him the terms of the Treaty of Versailles might have been no different, but the Senate would have been robbed of the partisan grievance on which it organized the defeat of ratification.

Day after day during the conference Mr. Wilson fought the fight for a peace that represented the liberal thought of the world. Day after day the odds against him lengthened. The contest finally resolved itself into a question of whether he should take what he could get or whether he should withdraw from the conference and throw the doors open to chaos. The President made the only decision that he had a moral right to make. He took what he could get, nor are the statesmen with whom he was associated altogether to blame because he did not get more. They too had to contend against forces over which they had no control. They were not free agents either, and Mr. Smuts has summed up the case in two sentences:

It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the
peoples behind them. The hope, the aspiration, for a new world
order of peace and right and justice, however deeply and
universally felt, was still only feeble and ineffective in
comparison with the dominant national passions which found their
expression in the peace treaty.

All the passions and hatreds bred of four years of merciless warfare, all the insatiable fury for revenge, all the racial ambitions that had been twisted and perverted by centuries of devious diplomacy--these were all gathered around the council table, clamorous in their demand to dictate the terms.

Mr. Wilson surrendered more than he dreamed he was surrendering, but it is not difficult to follow his line of reasoning. The League of Nations was to be a continuing court of equity, sitting in judgment on the peace itself, revising its terms when revision became necessary and possible, slowly readjusting the provisions of the treaty to a calmer and saner state of public mind. Get peace first. Establish the League, and the League would rectify the inevitable mistakes of the treaty.

It is a curious commentary on human nature that when the treaty was completed and the storm of wrath broke, all the rage, all the resentment, all the odium should have fallen on the one man who had struggled week in and week out against the forces of reaction and revenge and had written into the treaty all that it contains which makes for the international advancement of the race.

_Why The Treaty Was Beaten_

Into that record must also go the impressive fact that the Treaty of Versailles was rejected by the United States Senate, under the leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge, not because of its acknowledged defects and shortcomings, not because it breathed the spirit of a Carthaginian peace in its punitive clauses, but because of its most enlightened provision, the covenant of the League of Nations, which is the one hope of a war-racked world.