One whose duty it was to see him every night after the meetings of the Big Three reports that he found him with the left side of his face twitching. To collect his memory he would pass his hand several times wearily over his brow. The arduousness of the labor was not great enough to account for this. M. Clemenceau at nearly eighty stood the strain and an assassin's bullet as well. Mr. Lloyd George thrived on what he did. But the issue was not personal with them. Neither was assisting, with difficult amiability, at his own destruction. The time came when he might have had back some of the ground he had given. Mr. Lloyd George offered it to him. He would not have it. What it was proposed to amend was not so much the peace treaty as Mr. Wilson himself, and he could not admit that he needed amendment.
The issue had become personal and Mr. Lodge, upon Mr. Wilson's return, with malevolent understanding, kept it personal. The Republicans made their fight in the one way that made yielding by the President impossible. They made it nominally on the League but really on Mr. Wilson. The President might have compromised on the League, but he could not compromise on Mr. Wilson. Of such involvement in self there could be only one end.
Like a poet of one poem, Mr. Wilson is a statesman of one vision, an inspiring vision, but one which his own weakness kept him from realizing. His domestic achievements are not remarkable, his administration being one in which movements came to a head rather than one in which much was initiated. He might have cut the war short by two years and saved the world much havoc, if he had begun to fight when the Lusitania was sunk. Once in the war he saw his country small and himself large; he did not conceive of the nation as winning the war by sending millions of men to France; he saw himself as winning the war by talking across the Atlantic. At the Peace Conference he did not conceive of his country's winning the peace by the powerful position in which victory had left it; he saw himself as winning the peace by the hold he personally had upon the peoples of Europe. Like Napoleon, of whom Marshal Foch wrote recently, "Il oublia qu'un homme ne peut etre Dieu; qu'au-dessus de l' individu, il y a la nation," he forgot that man can not be God; that over and above the individual there is the nation.
In politics he knew at first better than any other, again to quote Foch, that "above men is morality." This knowledge brought him many victories. But at critical junctures, as in his 1918 appeal to the voters and in the treaty fight, he forgot that morality was above one man, himself. He excelled in appeals to the heart and conscience of the nation, a gift Mr. Harding has not; the lesser arts of the politician, tact and skill in the handling and selecting of men, were lacking.
He forgot in his greatness and aloofness the national passion for equality; which a more brilliant politician, Mr. Roosevelt, appeased by acting as the people's court jester, and which a shrewder politician, Mr. Harding, guards against by reminding the country that he is "just folks"; and in the end the masses turned upon him, like a Roman mob on a defeated gladiator.
GEORGE HARVEY
There is something inscrutably ludicrous in the anxiety, bordering upon consternation, that lurks in the elongated and grotesque shadow that George Harvey casts upon Washington. The Republican fathers, who now feel a sense of responsibility, after a lapse of many years, for the future of party and country, do not yet know how to take him.
As a campaign asset his value could be expressed in intelligible terms. But as a party liability, or asset,—many a good Republican wishes he knew which,—he remains an enigma. There is not one of the array of elders of either political persuasion who, while laughing at his satirical sword-play, does not watch him covertly out of the corner of the eye, trembling at the potential ruin they consider him capable of accomplishing.
With all his weaknesses,—principally an almost hilarious political irregularity,—but two Republican hands were raised against him in the Senate when he was nominated for the Court of Saint James. When he rather unbecomingly filliped John Bull on the nose in his maiden speech as the premier ambassador, incidentally ridiculing some of his own countrymen's war ideals, President Harding and Secretary Hughes, gravely and with rather obvious emphasis, tried to set the matter aright as best they could. But there was no hint of reprimand; only a fervent hope that the mercurial Harvey would remain quiescent until the memory of the episode passed.