TUMULTY.  Well, Governor, and supposing you had yielded to this “Temptation,” as you call it, what’s the proposition?

EX-PRES.  This ...  I had one power—­one weapon, still left to me unimpaired:  to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God!  And the proposition is just this:  whether to be stark honest, even against the apparent interests of the very cause you are out to plead, is not in the long run the surest way—­if it be of God—­ to help it make good:  whether defeat, with the whole truth told, isn’t better than defeat hidden away and disowned, in the hope that something may yet come of it.  You may get a truer judgment that way in the end; though at the time it may seem otherwise.  Yes, I was tempted to cry it aloud—­to make a clean breast of it—­to say, “We, the Governments of the People, the Democracies, the Free Nations of the world, have failed—­ have lost the peace which we could have won, because we would not give up the things which we loved so much better—­profit, revenge, our own too good opinion of ourselves, our own self-righteous judgment of others."...  I was tempted to it; and yet it has been charged against me that I would not admit failure because I wanted to save my face.

TUMULTY.  You have never been much scared by what people said, Governor.  That didn’t count, I reckon.

EX-PRES.  No, Tumulty; but this did—­that where all seemed dark, I still saw light.  Down there, among the wreckage, something was left—­an instrument of which I thought I saw the full future possibility more clearly than others.  I believe I do still.  And my main thought then was—­how best to secure that one thing to which, half blindly, they had agreed.  To win that, I was willing to give up my soul.

TUMULTY.  It’s the Covenant, you mean, Governor?

EX-PRES.  Yes, the Covenant!  That at least was won—­seemed won—­whatever else was lost.  Some of them were willing to let me have it only because they themselves believed it would prove useless—­just to save my face for all I had to give up in exchange.  And so I—­let them “save my face” for me; let them think that it was so—­just to give this one thing its chance.  And so, for that, and for that alone, I bound myself to the Treaty—­stood pledged to do my utmost to see it through:  a different thing, that, from telling the truth.  Was I wrong, Tumulty—­was I wrong?

TUMULTY.  No, no, Governor!  You did everything a man could—­under the circumstances.

EX-PRES.  I have said that often to myself:  and I hope, sometimes, that it may be true.  But a man who gives up anything of the truth, as he sees it, for reasons however good—­can he ever be sure of himself again?...  It’s a new thing for me to ask another man if I have done wrong.  But that’s the way I feel:  I don’t myself know.  And once, once, I was so sure—­that I was right, and that I should win!