should be laid before
them. He would have done better to remember a remarkable passage in one of
his own lectures, delivered ten years before. Speaking of the difficulty
of bringing pressure to bear upon the Senate, he had said that there is a
"course which the President may follow, and which one or two Presidents
of unusual political sagacity have followed, with the satisfactory
results that were to have been expected. He may himself be less stiff and
offish, may himself act in the true spirit of the Constitution and
establish intimate relations of confidence with the Senate on his own
initiative, not carrying his plans to completion and then laying them in
final form before the Senate to be accepted or rejected, but keeping
himself in confidential communication with the leaders of the Senate while
his plans are in course, when their advice will be of service to him and
his information of the greatest service to them, in order that there may
be veritable counsel and a real accommodation of views, instead of a final
challenge and contest." Had Wilson in 1918, and after, followed his own
advice, the outcome might have been different. But nothing describes so
perfectly the exact opposite of his attitude as the passage quoted above.

The President might at least have assuaged the sense of injury that
rankled in the hearts of the Senators by asking for their advice in the
appointment of the Peace Commission. Instead he kept his own counsel. He
decided to go to Paris himself as head of the Commission, and chose for
his associates men who were not qualified to win for him the support
that he needed in the Senate or in the country. Robert Lansing, as
Secretary of State, was a necessary appointment. Colonel House was
probably the best-fitted man in America for the approaching negotiations,
alike by his temperament, by the breadth of his knowledge of foreign
questions, and by his intimacy with foreign statesmen. But at least two
places on the Commission should have been given to eminent Republicans
and to men universally known and respected. If Wilson was unwilling to
select members of the Senate, he might have heeded public opinion which
called definitely for William Howard Taft and Elihu Root. Both were
pledged to the most important item of Wilson's programme, the League of
Nations; both exercised wide influence in the country and in the
Republican party. The Senate, with a Republican majority, would almost
certainly ratify an