TUMULTY.  You mean the secret treaties, Governor.  That’s been a puzzle to many of us:  what you knew about them, I mean.

EX-PRES.  Tumulty, I willed not to know them.  Rumour of them reached me, of course.  Had I then given them a Hearing, I might have been charged with complicity, the silence which gave consent.  Many were anxious that I should know of them—­at a time when opposition would have been very difficult—­premature, outside my province.  And so—­by not knowing—­I was free:  and when I stated the basis of the Peace terms, I stated them (and I was secure then in my power to do so) in terms which should in honour have made those secret treaties no longer tenable.  There was my first great error—­I acknowledge it, Tumulty:  that I believed in honour.

TUMULTY (reluctantly). Yes ...  I see that.  But it’s the sort of thing one can only see after it has happened.  You must have got a pretty deep-down insight into character, Governor, when you came to the top of things over there, to the top people, I mean.

EX PRES. (after a pause reflectively).  Yes. it was very interesting, when one got accustomed to it:  highly selected humanity, representative of things—­it was afraid of.  There daily sat four of us—­if one counts heads only; but we were, in fact, six, or seven, or eight characters.  And the characters sprang up and choked us.  Patriots, statesmen? oh yes! but also “careerists.”  Men whose future depends on the popular vote can’t always be themselves—­at least, it seemed not; for we should then have ceased to be “representative,” and it was as representatives that we had come.  And so one would sit and listen, and watch—­one person, and two characters.  Lloyd George, when his imagination was not swamped in self-satisfaction, was quite evangelical to listen to—­ sometimes.  But there he was representative—­not of principles, nor of those visionary sparks which he struck so easily and threw off like matches, but of a successful election cry for “hanging the Kaiser” and “making Germany pay.”  And having got his majority, he and his majority had become one.  But for that, he might—­he just might ... yet who can tell?  That tied him.  I was alone.

TUMULTY (coming nobly to the rescue).  Then take this from me, Governor:  for a man all alone you did wonders.

EX-PRES.  I did my best; but I failed.  My first mistake was when I believed in honour; my second, when I let them shut the doors.  Yes, to that he got me to agree.  Clever, clever; that was his first win.

TUMULTY.  Who, Governor?

EX-PRES. (with a dry laugh).  The man who told me he was on my side.  The reason?—­a kindly means of saving faces for those whom he and I were going to “persuade”—­of making the “climb-down” easier for them!  That seemed a helpful, charitable sort of reason, didn’t it?  One it would have been hard to refuse.  I didn’t; so the doors were shut to cover defeat and disappointment over the secret