was strongly urged to stand firm.  But he recoiled, his plea being that he had received an ultimatum from his American colleague, who spoke of quitting France and withdrawing the American troops unless the point were conceded.  And Mr. Wilson had his way.  One might have thought that this success would hearten the President to other and greater achievements.  But the leader who incarnated in his own person the highest strivings of the age, and who seemed destined to acquire pontifical ascendancy in a regenerated world, lacked the energy to hold his own when matters of greater moment and high principle were at stake.

These battles waged within the walls of the palace on the Quai d’Orsay were discussed out-of-doors by an interested and watchful public, and the conviction was profound and widespread that the President, having set his hand to the plow so solemnly and publicly, and having promised a harvest of far-reaching reforms, would not look back, however intractable the ground and however meager the crop.  But confronted with serious obstacles, he flinched from his task, and therein, to my thinking, lay his weakness.  If he had come prepared to assert his personal responsibility, to unfold his scheme, to have it amply and publicly discussed, to reject pusillanimous compromise in the sphere of execution, and to appeal to the peoples of the world to help him to carry it out, the last phase of his policy would have been worthy of the first, and might conceivably have inaugurated the triumph of the ideas which the indolent and the men of little faith rejected as incapable of realization.  To this hardy course, which would have challenged the approbation of all that is best in the world, there was an alternative:  Mr. Wilson might have confessed that his judgment was at fault, mankind not being for the moment in a fitting mood to practise the new tenets, that a speedy peace with the enemy was the first and most pressing duty, and that a world-parliament should be convened for a later date to prepare the peoples of the universe for the new ordering.  But he chose neither alternative.  At first it was taken for granted that in the twilight of the Conference hall he had fought valiantly for the principles which he had propounded as the groundwork of the new politico-social fabric, and that it was only when he found himself confronted with the insuperable antagonism of his colleagues of France and Britain that he reluctantly receded from his position and resolved to show himself all the more unbending to the envoys of the lesser countries.  But this assumption was refuted by State-Secretary Lansing, who admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the President’s Fourteen Points, which he had vowed to carry out, were not even discussed at the Conference.  The outcome of this attitude—­one cannot term it a policy—­was to leave the best of the ideas which he stood for in solution, to embitter every ally except France and Britain, and to scatter explosives all over the world.