f his career he made his first fatal blunder.

Every President in the off-year election urges the election of a
Congress of his own party. That is part of the routine of politics, and
during the campaign of 1918 Mr. Wilson's advisers urged him to follow
the precedent. What they forgot and he forgot was that it was no time
for partisan precedents, and he allowed his distrust of the Republican
leaders in Congress to sweep him into an inexcusable error that he, of
all men, should have avoided. The Sixty-fifth Congress was anything but
popular. The Western farmers were aggrieved because the price of wheat
had been regulated and the price of cotton had not. The East was
greatly dissatisfied with the war taxes, which it regarded as an unfair
discrimination, and it remembered Mr. Kitchin's boast that the North
wanted the war and the North would have to pay for it. There was
general complaint from business interests against the Southern
Democratic control of the legislative department, and all this
sentiment instantly crystallized when the President asked for another
Democratic Congress. Republicans who were loyally supporting the
Administration in all its war activities were justly incensed that a
party issue had been raised. A Republican Congress was elected and by
inference the President sustained a personal defeat.

Misfortunes did not come singly in Mr. Wilson's case. Following the
mistake of appealing for the election of a Democratic Congress he made
an equally serious mistake in the selection of his Peace Commission.

To anybody who knows Mr. Wilson, who knows Mr. Lloyd George, who knows
Mr. Clemenceau, nothing could be sillier than the chapters of Keynes
and Dillon in which they undertake to picture the President's unfitness
to cope with the European masters of diplomacy. Mr. Wilson for years
had been playing with European masters of diplomacy as a cat plays with
a mouse. To assume that Mr. Wilson was ever deceived by the transparent
tactics of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Clemenceau is to assume the
impossible. It would be as easy to conceive of his being tricked and
bamboozled by the United States Senate.

_The Peace Commission_

Mr. Wilson needed strong Republican representation on the Peace
Commission not to reinforce him in his struggles with his adversaries
at Paris but to divide with him the responsibility for a treaty of
peace that was doomed in advance to be a disappointment. Although the
popular sentiment o