Your optimism may, after all, be due to your ignorance, coupled with the fact that you are living in a land vast and isolated, which has not quite exhausted its resources and opportunities. The most materialistic people on earth in your relationship to each other, you leap into remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is true that “God takes care of children and fools,” then God is taking wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.
In our country we would put a man of Mr. Bryan’s type in charge of an orphan asylum, and feel that the children would be safe with him at least till their twelfth year; and yet I know that he has done vigorous fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in my book about America, which as you know I intend to write and have already begun.
It was quite a change of atmosphere when I went from the Department of State to the White House. The President’s secretary seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear; just the kind of person a great man needs as a buffer against his friends, and as a guard against his enemies. The atmosphere of the White House is dignified, yet not cold; democratic, yet reserved; you feel that it is a place of power.
Above everything else you have done for me I want to thank you for making it possible for me to meet President Wilson. He is not at all the type of man I expected to find. There is nothing pedantic about him and I do not know a man in any of our universities like him. He is not as easy to analyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the greater, more complex and stronger nature. He has the firmness which rulers should possess, and may be too unyielding when once he has made up his mind to anything. He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not as dogmatic, not nearly as friendly, and yet I came nearer to that which I sought in him, and I think I understood him better. He let me do all the talking, but asked all manner of questions; yet he told me more that way than Mr. Bryan, who did all the talking.
If President Wilson is a politician, he is a new kind which I have never met before. I think he has made many mistakes, which of course is natural. There is only one of your presidents who never made mistakes, and that was President Roosevelt. He made blunders, which he had the pugnacity and the sheer physical courage to turn into political capital, and then blundered again.
President Wilson was in the midst of the Mexican muddle when I saw him, yet he seemed to me very well poised, and bearing his many burdens, not like a martyr or a saint, but as a really strong man ought to bear them.
Of course you do not believe that I took your eulogies of America “fur baare Muenze” (at their face value). There are two Americas and you are living in but one of them. Your America lies in the high altitudes of Lake Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. The other America which you tried to hide from me I saw, just because you tried to hide it. It is sordid, base, selfish, and above all strong; but that you do not seem to know.
You have modified my view of America, but you have not changed it. You are still a big experiment as a nation, and I am not sure that it will be a successful one. You have nothing to teach us in government, business or education. Just one thing I envy you—your faith in your unfinished country and in yourself as a force in its making.
As you know, I do not share your faith; especially do I not believe that one individual or many individuals can change the course of empires.
You think yourself citizen, king and priest; but you are merely an atom, a conscious atom of course, and in that and that alone, in that you are conscious, and know yourself a part of the whole and believe yourself an effective part of it, lies happiness. I enjoyed hearing you talk about the American Spirit; you talked about the soul of a country as if you had seen it and felt it and loved it.