Wilson expected to have his plans ready both for a cautious reconstruction at home and a fixed programme at the Peace Conference. He had always been forehanded. In November, 1918, the Central Powers were crushed like an egg-shell. The President for once in his life was unready; he fell back upon a political hand-to-mouth regimen.1

Europe now lay in ruins. Russia was torn by factions, led by men to whom hatred was a master motive, and broken by Germany into half a dozen helpless states. The peoples who had fought Germany so long were at the point of starvation, not excepting England once the richest of them all. From eight to ten million soldiers had been killed; more than that number of other men, women, and children had lost their lives as a result of the war. The United States alone of the great peoples of the world remained rich and prosperous, stronger both in man power and in resources, than any likely combination of nations. At the head of the United States, as a strange fortune would have it, stood the one idealist in high position in all the world, a man who could speak in tones that none could hush, and to whom all the oppressed peoples everywhere looked as to a second Messiah.2 It was a terrible responsibility. How would Wilson meet the coming tests, greater tests than were ever put to any other leader of mankind?

If the people of the United States had been united that November day when Wilson actually began the new ordering of the modern world, great things must could have been accomplished and indeed a new era inaugurated. The sudden turn of things would not have worked so much ill. But the reader of these pages knows that the United States was

This seems evident in the President's address to Congress on December, 1918. Ray Stannard Baker, who was in Europe at the time as a reporter for the President, in a series of syndicated articles for the American newspapers, October-November, 1919.

not then, and had never before been, anything like a unit.1 I will not rehearse here the evidence of the sharp and growing sectional hostility, the distress of the best of Republican men and women that Wilson should be President at that great moment, or the suppressed anger of hosts of Germans who could not forgive him for bringing down upon the heads of the German rulers the awful doom that came with the armistice. Every intelligent man who sees what goes on in our cities or hears what is said upon the market places of the country towns knows that the existence of these elements negatived the idea that we, as a people, could then function in world affairs as a unit.

To make the situation more difficult, the recent election gave responsibility to a group of men in Congress who either from deep-set economic or bitter partisan reasons must oppose the President, no matter whether he did well or ill. And the very nature of Wilson, as well as the effect of his writings upon government, stiffened his neck against the leaders of the new majority. Wilson believed in the principle of a responsible ministry, such as that of Great Britain; but, although the election had gone against him, he could not resign. Indeed it may very well be doubted whether the Democrats would not have won a great victory if the President's name had been on the ticket. The American system is not a flexible one. The people of the country, knowing that Wilson must represent them in the coming peace conference, for reasons most conflicting and confusing, deliberately weakened his hand. They set up a Congress which in the nature of things must be guided by men who were both political and personal enemies of the President. And before the election took place, as if to commit the country to a foreign policy opposed to that of Wilson, Colonel Roosevelt Except perhaps at certain emotional climaxes like that of April, 1917.

and Senator Lodge made up and announced a Republican foreign programme in which Wilson's ideas were flaunted.1 The Roosevelt-Lodge terms were frankly imperialistic. They reasserted the doctrine of might and hate which the Germans had exhausted.

But the opposition leaders were not content merely to resist the diplomacy of the President. They gave the peoples of the allied countries the opinion that the United States favoured their more ruthless policies rather than the milder and more humane views of Wilson. A poll of the press of the country during the latter days of November, 1918, would reveal an unprecedented disposition to thwart the only man who could constitutionally speak for the country. Revenge, indemnities, and drastic economic repression were very common terms. And when Wilson decided to go in person to Paris, there was a loud protest in Congress, although the question did not, of course, come to a vote. Newspapers like the New York Sun insisted that the President did not represent the country. Two of the most eminent lawyers of the East gave out studied opinions that, if Wilson left the shores of the United States, he would ipso facto cease to be the head of the ⚫ nation. An effort was made to get an order of court to declare the office of president vacant, and it was publicly stated that the Vice-President must enter the White House. For weeks the front pages of the newspapers were almost daily occupied with stories of this sort. One paper insisted that ninety-five per cent. of the people viewed the President's trip to Europe with "misgiving and dislike." With Congress in an ugly frame of mind, the country recently committed to a return to Republican ideas, and the great body of conserva

This is too well understood to require proof. But to those who may wish proof reference is made to the files of the Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1918.

George W. Wickersham, former attorney-general, and ex-Senator George F. Edmunds.

tive America fearful of those "ideals" which would not allow Wilson to take something out of the common European débâcle for the United States, the President certainly had reason to fear that he would not be able to press the country's cause successfully before the assembled diplomats of Europe and the whole world.1

Nor did the older social elements of Europe wish Wilson to appear at the conference. The effect of Wilson's fourteen points was certainly very great in Germany and in AustroHungary. Wilson did as much to break the power of Germany by the constant repetition of his ideals as any military commander whatsoever. This was all well enough so long as the war was actually waging. But when it ceased, the London Saturday Review, true to its character, declared against them. Stephen Pinchon, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, agreed with the London conservatives in the view that Germany must pay huge indemnities and that individual Germans must hang by the hundred for obedience to the orders of an emperor already dethroned. Mr. Lloyd George was preparing to wage a campaign for a return of a parliament friendly to him on the cry of "pay to the last shilling."

It seems that no one stopped to estimate what it would be possible for the German people to pay in half a century. The sum of the damage which they had done, and seemed glad to do at the time, including the havoc wrought in Poland, Russia, Roumania, Servia, and Italy, as well as that done

Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1918. This paper throughout the late autumn and winter continued to quote the London Morning Post, a bitterly anti-American paper with a reported circulation of only 30,000, as the press of London. It seldom if ever took note of what the London Daily News or the Manchester Guardian said. In London and Paris the imperialistic press quoted the Chicago Tribune and other similar American papers as the "press of the United States."

The Literary Digest, November 16, 1918, gives brief quotations to that effect.

し

on the western front and upon the sea, must have been greater than the sum of the wealth of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. If actual damages amounted to so much what must indemnities, levied after the Bismarckian ideal, have totalled? At the time a great demand was being made up in the United States, in England, and France for the last dollar, there was a vigorous and popular campaign in each of the countries concerned against the purchase of any kind of goods from Germany. Men who are called wise appeared to think that one or two hundred million dollars could be collected from peoples with whom nobody was to trade, and living in regions that did not produce foodstuffs sufficient for their own consumption! Men shrunk from the Metternich philosophy that a whole people might be destroyed and the world not suffer, and yet they proposed terms of settlement which must either have destroyed Germany entirely or left her to nurse a grievance too great to be borne in peace."

Wilson did not agree with men who urged such impossible measures. He stood upon his fourteen points. Because he did not, like Lloyd George, join in a campaign of pure demagoguery; because Wilson refused to talk wildly and hoped to bring Germany penitent back into the family of civilized nations, he was attacked by men of the highest political and social standing in every country. One can not but think of Colonel Roosevelt's language during the last months of his life; and thousands who have so long admired him must apologize or make explanations or allow

Manufacturer's Record, quoted in The Literary Digest, November 9, 1918.

Isaac F. Marcosson in New York Times, of December 5, 1918, and many other papers reflected this view: "The allies do not want any feelings of altruism to prevail." See also New York Times, December 12, 1918.

"This is a harsh term to apply to a man who did the world such a tremendous service as he rendered during the long war. But there seems to be no doubt that he knew that the promises he made on his campaign of 1918 could not be fulfilled.