For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,—their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he—Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it—every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration—into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him—around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue—not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.
So it came to pass—a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed—a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off....
Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago—who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this?
My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them.
The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics.
The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them—the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us.