as Mr.
Wilson was; but you will not be weak. If, on the contrary, you are
indifferent to ideas and considerate of persons you find it hard to
say "Decided" to any question. And somewhere there must be
authority, the passing of the final judgment and the giving of
orders.

But he compensates for his own defects. Almost as good as greatness
is a knowledge of your own limitations; and Mr. Harding knows his
thoroughly. Out of his modesty, his desire to reinforce himself,
has proceeded the strongest cabinet that Washington has seen in a
generation. He likes to have decisions rest upon the broad base of
more than one intelligence and he has surrounded himself for this
purpose with able associates. His policies will lack imagination,
which is not a composite product, but they will have practicality,
which is the greatest common denomination of several minds; and he,
moreover, is himself unimaginative and practical.

Whatever superstructure of world organization he takes part in,
behind it will be the reality, a private understanding with the
biggest man in sight; for this reason the fall of Lloyd George and
the succession of a Labor government in England will disconcert him
terribly. The democratic passion for equality, which dogs the
tracks of the great, he mollifies by reminding the nation always
that he is "just folks," by opening the White House lawn gates, by
calling everyone by his first name. So constant is his aim to
appease it that I wonder if he is not sometimes betrayed into
addressing his Secretary of State as "Charley."

WOODROW WILSON

The explanation of President Wilson will be found in a certain
inferiority. When all his personal history becomes known, when his
papers and letters have all been published and read, when the
memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there
will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental
or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness,
shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought
on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man
with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a strange,
impeded, self-absorbed personality.

History arranged the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a
lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"--all save one, and he the
nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with
the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of o