foresee that the compromise
of the Peace would leave him with so little character that British
Liberals, their faith destroyed, should in the end couple his name
with their own Premier's and exclaim, "Your man Wilson talks like
Jesus Christ, but he acts like Lloyd George!"

More than all others he scorned Lodge. The Massachusetts Senator
who had put by scholarship for politics and had won the opportunity
to do menial service for a political machine hated the man who had
chosen scholarship, for whatever motive, and come out with the
Presidency. You hate the man you might perhaps have been if you had
chosen more boldly, more according to your heart--if you are like
Mr. Lodge.

A life of demeaning himself to politicians, of waiting for dead
men's shoes in the Senate, had, however, brought some compensations
to Lodge, among others an inordinate capacity to hurt. The
Massachusetts Senator could get under the President's skin as no
other man could. Washington is a place where every whisper is heard
in the White House.

Mr. Lodge's favorite private charge uttered in a tone of withering
scorn was that the President failed to respond as a man would to
the national insult offered by Germany in sinking the Lusitania
because there was something womanish about him and he would tell,
to prove it, how Wilson went white and almost collapsed over the
news that blood had been shed through the landing of American
marines at Vera Cruz.

The President hardly failed to hear this. Perhaps it reminded him
of that something in him which he was always trying to forget, that
something which diverted his life toward failure at the outset,
which once betrayed him, with a strange mixture of the arrogance
and inferiority, into his famous words "too proud to fight."

At any rate mutual comprehension and hatred between these two men
was instinctive, each having the opposite choice in the beginning
and neither in his heart perhaps ever having forgiven himself
wholly for his choice. Mr. Wilson could never get Mr. Lodge wholly
out of his mind in the last two years of his Presidency, a
disability which prevented him from looking quite calmly and sanely
at public questions.

The story of the President's appeal for a Democratic Congress in
1918 which has never been fully told, illustrates the bearing this
Lodge obsession had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the
Congressional election was approaching ex-Congressman Scott Ferris,
then acting as Cha