where that Knox legal note came in. Congressmen in the
backwoods quoted cryptic passages from it, thought they were saying
something, and proceeded to make their audiences believe that
somehow England had hit us with a club--or would have hit us but
for Knox. That pure discourtesy kept us apart from English sympathy
for something like two years.

Then the President took it up. He threw the legal twaddle into the
gutter. He put the whole question in a ten-minutes' speech to
Congress, full of clearness and fairness and high courtesy. It won
even the rural Congressmen. It was read in every capital and the
men who conduct every government looked up and said, "This is a
real man, a brave man, a just man." You will recall what Sir Edward
Grey said to me: "The President has taught us all a lesson and set
us all a high example in the noblest courtesy."

This one act brought these two nations closer together than they
had ever been since we became an independent nation. It was an act
of courtesy....

My dear House, suppose the postman some morning were to leave at
your door a thing of thirty-five heads and three appendices, and
you discovered that it came from an old friend whom you had long
known and greatly valued--this vast mass of legal stuff, without a
word or a turn of courtesy in it--what would you do? He had a
grievance, your old friend had. Friends often have. But instead of
explaining it to you, he had gone and had his lawyers send this
many-headed, much-appendiced ton of stuff. It wasn't by that method
that you found your way from Austin, Texas, to your present
eminence and wisdom. Nor was that the way our friend found his way
from a little law-office in Atlanta, where I first saw him, to the
White House.

More and more I am struck with this--that governments are human.
They are not remote abstractions, nor impersonal institutions. Men
conduct them; and they do not cease to be men. A man is made up of
six parts of human nature and four parts of facts and other
things--a little reason, some prejudice, much provincialism, and of
the particular fur or skin that suits his habitat. When you wish to
win a man to do what _you_ want him to do, you take along a few
well-established facts, some reasoning and such-like, but you take
along als