Never since the Declaration of Independence and the first peal of the Liberty Bell did a chief executive walk up a winding stair into so pretty a parlor as when Mr. Wilson, with the naivete of a Princeton president, faced that cacophony of sectional jazz bands to witness the cryptic hand-writing on the wall at the peace table. Who was his adviser? Was it a gentleman with owl spectacles from the oil fields of Texas? And was there no one who could have cautioned him against the finesse of Clemenceau who spent sixty years sharpening his wits on the political grindstone of Europe? Was no one in America aware that the French Premier is a fluent speaker in English?
Mr. Wilson could speak no French, which reminds me that Jack Spratt could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean, and so betwixt them both they licked the platter clean. But a clean plate does not mean a clean slate, and the President brought one home filled with the riddle of the Sphinx. Yet the Peace Conference revealed the secret of perpetual motion and conferred a timely service, for the hubbub created by the Wilson-Lansing-House-Party at Versailles kept the Senate from passing into a trance.
A blind man can tell the difference between pepper pods and apple dumplings, but who can tell where tweedle-dee ends and tweedle-dum begins? No one. Then how can your statesmen distinguish between the psychological characteristics of the Hungarians and the Bohemians, the Bavarians and the Saxons, the difference between a polka and a polonaise, a pig in a stye and a pig in a slaughter house?
Patriotism often depends on an influence too subtle for analysis, and yet they would enact drastic laws to bind all Europe in one bond. They will hardly succeed in a thousand years.
Some pay through the nose, some through the pocket and some through the stomach. Americans are paying through all three. Danton declared the secret of the French Revolution was audacity, and audacity, and again audacity, but what you need today is vigilance repeated ad infinitum.
I am placing you in communication with some of the most far-reaching minds of the past hundred and fifty years. The psycho-phone is new and we are using it for the first time.
THE LATE GENERAL U. S. GRANT
Recorded September Ninth, 1920