college professor,
when he overworked at writing and university extension lectures, to
make his small salary as a teacher equal to the support of his
family, his three children and his aged parents. There was his
failure at literature, for his "History of the United States"
brought him neither fame nor money, the public finding it dull and
unreadable.

Then the crowning unsuccess as President of Princeton; for when his
luck changed and a political career opened to him as Governor of
New Jersey, with trustees and alumni against him, nothing seemed to
be before him but resignation and a small professorship in a
Southern College. It was a straightened life that he had led when
he came to Washington for the first time as President, scandalizing
the servants of the White House with the scantness of his personal
effects. There had been neither the time nor the means nor probably
the energy for larger human contacts. And something inherent always
held him back from the world, something which diverted him to
academic life, which when he was writing his "Congressional
Government", his best book, held him in Baltimore, almost a suburb
of Washington, where he read what he wrote to his fellow-students
at Johns Hopkins, whose livelier curiosity took them often to the
galleries of the House and the Senate about which he was writing
from a distance.

Those to whom life is kinder than it was during many years to Mr.
Wilson have naturally a zest for it. Robuster natures than his even
though life averts her face, often preserve a zest for it.
Conscious of his powers he seems to have fortified himself against
failure with scorn. He had a scorn for the intellects of those who
succeed by arts which he did not possess. He had scorn for
politicians. He had a scorn for wealth. He had a scorn for his
enemies. He had a scorn for Republicans. He had a scorn for the men
with whom he had to deal in Europe, the heads of the Allied
Governments.

Above all he scorned Lloyd George, an instinct telling him that the
British Premier had a thousand arts where he himself, unschooled in
conference with equals, had none. He said of Lloyd George just
before he sailed for Paris, suspecting him of treachery to the
League of Nations, "I shall look him in the eye and say to him Damn
you, if you do not accept the League I shall go to the people of
Great Britain and say things to them that will shake your
government."

When he made this threat he could not