ne who has
run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but
inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in
his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he
forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great
things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the
everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is
a crisis fate produces a man big enough to meet it.

The world finds it hard to speak of Mr. Wilson except in superlatives.
A British journalist called him the other day, "the wickedest man in
the world." This was something new in extravagance. I asked, "Why
the wickedest?" He said, "Because he was so unable to forget himself
that he brought the peace of the world down in a common smash with
his own personal fortunes."

On the other hand General Jan Christian Smuts, writing with that
perspective which distance gives, pronounces it to be not Wilson's
fault but the fault of humanity that the vision of universal peace
failed. Civilization was not advanced enough to make peace without
vindictiveness possible.

This debate goes on and on. Mr. Wilson is either the worst hated or
the most regretted personality of the Great War. The place of no
one else is worth disputing. Lloyd George is the consummate
politician, limited by the meanness of his art. Clemenceau is the
personification of nationality, limited by the narrowness of his
view. Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative greatness when
the whole earth listened to him and followed him; an hour which
ended with him only dimly aware of his vision and furiously
conscious of pin pricks.

You observe this inadequacy in Mr. Wilson, this incapacity to
endure, at the outset of his career. It is characteristic of
certain temperaments that when they first face life they should run
away from it as Mr. Wilson did when, having studied law and having
been admitted to the bar, he abandoned practice and went to teach
in a girls' school. That was the early sign in him of that sense of
unfitness for the more arduous contacts of life which was so
conspicuous a trait during his presidency. He could not endure
meeting men on an equal footing, where there was a conflict of
wills, a rough clash of minds, where no concession was made to
sensitiveness and egotism.

Some nervous insufficiency causes this shrinking, like the quick
retreat from cold water of an inadequate body. Common