nceau were in theirs. Gradually the conviction
entered Mr. Wilson's soul that what was being destroyed at Paris
was Mr. Wilson. The figure of Senator Lodge began to rise across
the Atlantic, malevolent and evil, the Lodge against whom he had
wanted to appeal to the American people.

The strain was telling upon him. He had to sit beside his
destroyers with that smiling amiability which Mr. Lansing records
in his book. He had to deal with men on a basis of equality, a
thing which he had run away from doing in his youth, which all his
life had made too great demands upon his sensitive, arrogant
nature.

One whose duty it was to see him every night after the meetings of
the Big Three reports that he found him with the left side of his
face twitching. To collect his memory he would pass his hand
several times wearily over his brow. The arduousness of the labor
was not great enough to account for this. M. Clemenceau at nearly
eighty stood the strain and an assassin's bullet as well. Mr. Lloyd
George thrived on what he did. But the issue was not personal with
them. Neither was assisting, with difficult amiability, at his own
destruction. The time came when he might have had back some of the
ground he had given. Mr. Lloyd George offered it to him. He would
not have it. What it was proposed to amend was not so much the
peace treaty as Mr. Wilson himself, and he could not admit that he
needed amendment.

The issue had become personal and Mr. Lodge, upon Mr. Wilson's
return, with malevolent understanding, kept it personal. The
Republicans made their fight in the one way that made yielding by
the President impossible. They made it nominally on the League but
really on Mr. Wilson. The President might have compromised on the
League, but he could not compromise on Mr. Wilson. Of such
involvement in self there could be only one end.

Like a poet of one poem, Mr. Wilson is a statesman of one vision,
an inspiring vision, but one which his own weakness kept him from
realizing. His domestic achievements are not remarkable, his
administration being one in which movements came to a head rather
than one in which much was initiated. He might have cut the war
short by two years and saved the world much havoc, if he had begun
to fight when the Lusitania was sunk. Once in the war he saw his
country small and himself large; he did not conceive of the nation
as winning the war by sending millions of men to France; he saw
himself as winning t