that he did not receive through private channels the current of faith and enthusiasm of which the public sources seemed dammed up.  He needed, but lacked, the added strength of collective faith.  The German terror still overhung us, and even the sympathetic public was very cautious; the enemy must not be encouraged, our friends must be supported, this was not the time for discord or agitations, the President must be trusted to do his best.  And in this drought the flower of the President’s faith withered and dried up.

Thus it came to pass that the President countermanded the George Washington, which, in a moment of well-founded rage, he had ordered to be in readiness to carry him from the treacherous halls of Paris back to the seat of his authority, where he could have felt himself again.  But as soon, alas, as be had taken the road of compromise, the defects, already indicated, of his temperament and of his equipment, were fatally apparent.  He could take the high line; he could practise obstinacy; he could write Notes from Sinai or Olympus; he could remain unapproachable in the White House or even in the Council of Ten and be safe.  But if he once stepped down to the intimate equality of the Four, the game was evidently up.

Now it was that what I have called his theological or Presbyterian temperament became dangerous.  Having decided that some concessions were unavoidable, he might have sought by firmness and address and the use of the financial power of the United States to secure as much as he could of the substance, even at some sacrifice of the letter.  But the President was not capable of so clear an understanding with himself as this implied.  He was too conscientious.  Although compromises were now necessary, he remained a man of principle and the Fourteen Points a contract absolutely binding upon him.  He would do nothing that was not honorable; he would do nothing that was not just and right; he would do nothing that was contrary to his great profession of faith.  Thus, without any abatement of the verbal inspiration of the Fourteen Points, they became a document for gloss and interpretation and for all the intellectual apparatus of self-deception, by which, I daresay, the President’s forefathers had persuaded themselves that the course they thought it necessary to take was consistent with every syllable of the Pentateuch.

The President’s attitude to his colleagues had now become:  I want to meet you so far as I can; I see your difficulties and I should like to be able to agree to what you propose; but I can do nothing that is not just and right, and you must first of all show me that what you want does really fall within the words of the pronouncements which are binding on me.  Then began the weaving of that web of sophistry and Jesuitical exegesis that was finally to clothe with insincerity the language and substance of the whole Treaty.  The word was issued to the witches of all Paris: