A picturesque old woman who sells papers at the bottom of the stairs has made a regular customer out of me, and I scan the morning news as I ascend the steps, and by the time I have reached the top I find thoughts of beauty and of the good old days are being replaced by thoughts of work and of the war. As I walk across the Pincian Hill I am conscious that I am big with joy at what the past twenty-four hours have accomplished at the battle-front, and throbbing with anticipation of what the following day will bring forth. That it will soon bring victory, complete and absolute, even the professional warrior is now forced to admit, and soon we shall bask again in the light of a livable world.

[CHAPTER XVIII
THE AMERICAN EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH]

The shrieks of the American eagle have been joyous sounds to American ears since 1776, when we discovered his capacity to render our hymn of freedom. Heretofore our national bird has been in best voice on his native soil. When brought to Europe by statesman or hero, by citizen or delegate, it was found that certain conditions there impaired his vocality and the flap of his wings. Suddenly in 1918 all this changed. Conditions were not only favorable—they were ideal. Perched upon a parapet of Guildhall, sitting majestically on the Eiffel Tower, alight on the campanile that crowns the Capitoline Hill, his shrieks conveyed a message to the people of Europe whose ears have awaited it longingly for centuries, and the flapping of his wings created a current that stimulated and energized them. Floating majestically through the empyrean, he was to those human beings, weary of war, of tyranny, and of privilege, what the dove was to the occupants of the ark—the emblem of salvation. Nothing could then convince the peoples of Italy that this harbinger of hope had not been liberated by Woodrow Wilson. I cannot believe that the American eagle has permanently forsaken the United States of America. I anticipate hearing there again the familiar scream. One tolerates him better at home than in Europe, but I must accord the bird great sapiency in having selected the autumn of 1918 to give the European people the opportunity to judge of the quality and quantity of his vocal production.

It is a platitude to say that no prophet or potentate, no king or conqueror was ever greeted with such spontaneous, whole-hearted, genuine enthusiasm as President Wilson was greeted in Italy, and, if I may judge from newspaper accounts, the reception which was offered him there was not unlike that which he received in England and France. He went to Italy when its people were incensed by the conduct of the newly fledged Jugoslavs, and when the press was in the throes of inflammatory polemics over the fate of the Treaty of London. It was widely known in Italy that President Wilson was not in sympathy with the Sonninian alleged imperialistic policies and that he was fully in sympathy with the Jugoslav aspirations. Nevertheless, the Italians, from royalty to peasant, welcomed him with a spontaneity and warmth, an enthusiasm and whole-heartedness, a genuineness and devotion that was as moving as anything I ever witnessed. The hour of his arrival in Rome was not definitely known until shortly before he arrived. But despite this hundreds of people remained in the street all night, and thousands of them gathered there before sunrise in order that they might not miss the opportunity of looking upon him whom they firmly believed to be the apostle of liberty and freedom, the herald of light and brotherly love. It was not curiosity alone that prompted them to this effort and sacrifice of comfort. Curiosity undoubtedly entered into it, but the potent reason for the outpouring that took place that memorable January was that their presence might convey to our President an expression of their esteem and an earnest of their appreciation of his efforts.

No American, though he had the heart of a frog and the emotional caliber of a lizard, could suppress the succession of thrills that mounted from his bowels to his brain on seeing with what dignity, suavity, and self-respecting composure their Chief Magistrate comported himself as he was transported through the Via Nazionale, seated beside the most democratic and beloved king in the world. Though the American spectator had spent his time impregnating with venom darts which he believed he would gladly drive into the President, he had to admit that there was a man who more than satisfied all of Kipling's "Ifs." When he encountered him later in the Palazzo del Drago acting as host at the table of his country's charming ambassadress, or at Montecitorio, where he told the Solons of Italy of his country's hopes, ideals, aspirations, and willingness, or in less solemn moments on the Capitoline, when he received the honorary citizenship of Rome, he knew that his first impressions were founded in verity and he lent a willing ear to the screech of the American eagle which revealed itself throughout the entire Italian press. Every city of Italy clamored for a visit, and though he spent but a few minutes in Genoa and a few hours in Milan, the outpouring of the people to welcome him was no less remarkable than it was in Rome. The tribute which Europe gave Mr. Wilson seemed to depress many of his countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an extraordinary thing that while Europe rocked with his fame America reeked with his infamy.

After having lived two years in Italy I found many things about the Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond comprehension. Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such accord. From the day he decided to represent our country in the Peace Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from which could readily be formulated a new hymn of hate. What was the genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust? From whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest, and who attempted to conform his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only statesman who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would make for perpetual peace, be hated and distrusted, vilified and traduced, thwarted and misrepresented by so many of his countrymen? What had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be accorded him? I propose to attempt to answer these questions and thus to suggest why he has been a failure as President. I know the replies usually given to these questions by his depreciators and defamers. "His nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot co-operate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he selects his coadjutors, aides, and advisers from those whom he knows he can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he wage war until months after repeated casus belli; he is hypocritical in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan 'He kept us out of war,' and immediately on being elected he 'thrust' the country into war; he was 'too proud to fight' in 1916, but keen to fight in 1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a socialist masquerading as a liberal; he is a Bolshevik beneath the mask of a radical. In brief, he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States; intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people; and withal so completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly human feeling has been crowded from him."

Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of his career save that he was president of Princeton University and governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United States, elected by the Democratic party, hate him as if he were a bitter personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without character, depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had once, or many times, betrayed them. Men who are unable to give the smallest specificity to their dislike of him feel that they add to their stature by detracting from his accomplishments and defaming him. Not one of them with whom I have talked has been able to state the facts of his disagreement and rupture with the trustees of Princeton University. My understanding was that he insisted that the university should submit to certain reforms that would make it democratic in reality as well as in name, and that would enhance its pedagogical usefulness, and that there should not be a privileged class in the university, viz., members of exclusive clubs whose portals were opened by money. He maintained that his training as an educator, his experience as an administrator, his accomplishment as a student of history and as an interpreter of events, his experience with men, entitled him to a judgment concerning the needs of such an institution that should be given a hearing, and he contended that his recommendations, rather than those of trustees whose training had been largely in the world of affairs, be put in operation and at least be given a trial. He had the courage to jeopardize his very bread and butter, and that of his family, at a time in his life when his physical forces had reached their zenith rather than sacrifice what he believed to be a principle. The men who were permitted to take Woodrow Wilson's measure in that contest had no more idea of his stature than if they were blind. They would have laughed to scorn the idea that five years later the people of the United States would select him for their president. It was in this episode that his repute not to be able to do team-work with his equals and his inferiors originated. Time has shown that it isn't only a question of being able to do team-work, he cannot do his best work in an atmosphere of friction and dissent. It is as impossible for him to yield a position which he has taken, and which we will assume he believes to be right, as it is impossible for the magnet to yield the needle that it has attracted; therefore he adopts the only course for him—he doesn't enter contests, save golf with his physician.

His cabinet meetings are a farce, so say they who have never attended one and who have never even spoken to a cabinet member. He selects pygmies for his cabinet and for his aides in order that they may proffer him no advice, resent no contradiction or protest indignities to their offices. This in face of the fact that he and his cabinet and his aides have conditioned the only miracle of modern times, namely, throwing a whole country, millions of whose people were adverse to war, into a bellicose state which was never before witnessed; conditioning and transporting the men and material resources of that country across the Atlantic and into the fighting lines at a crucial moment, at a time when the backs of the Allies were against the wall, according to the statements of their own authorized spokesmen; who succeeded in engendering in the composite mind of the American people a determination to win the war that was more potent than men or weapons; who impregnated the composite soul of the Allies with a faith that the world would be an acceptable abode for the common people once the enemy was crushed, that transcended in its intensity the faith of the Christian martyrs; who filled the heart of every statesman of the Allied nations with a hope and belief that there was within him the masterful mind that would conduct their legions to victory and salvation. If he and his pygmies accomplished this, I am one who maintains they are myrmidons and giants. But they didn't do it, his detractors say. The rejoinder to which is: "I know, a little bird did it!"

If we had entered the war after the sinking of the Lusitania, when the wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and inestimable expenditures would have been spared. Where is the man in the United States of America to-day who has revealed the Jove-like mind that entitles him to make such sentient statement? When he is found, how can he possibly know? What delivery of thought, idea, conception, execution has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say believed? How can any one possibly know what would have been the result of our entrance into the war at that time? If any one thing is responsible for America's efficiency in the war, it is that it had the American people fused into one man with one mind, determined to win the war. I am sure that I encountered nothing in the United States in my travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again in the spring of 1916 that made me believe that the people of our country wanted war, or that there could be developed in them at that time a sentiment which would make for such internal resistance of the people as they displayed in the spring of 1917 and continued to display until November 11, 1918. I cannot speak from personal knowledge, for I was not in the United States during the year of its war efficiency, but I am told that there was never a whisper of disloyalty or a syllable of disparagement of the President personally during that time. But many of those who were silent then are strident now. Their enforced silence has enhanced the carry-power of their voices, and their clamor prevents the harmony that the world is seeking. They not only defame Wilson, but they contend that the part we played in the war has been overestimated. It has been, but not by us. It has been evaluated by those whom it was our most sacred privilege to aid. They neither minimize our efforts not underestimate our accomplishment. The British know that they were steadfast; the French realize that they were resolute; the Italians appreciate that they were brave. We know it, but that does not prevent us from realizing the magnitude of the rôle we played, and the man who was responsible for it is the man to whom the world, save a political party in the United States, gives thanks and expresses appreciation. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Americans do not boast of the part they played in winning the war, but they do encourage that which is far worse than boasting—lying about it, particularly when the motive for such perversion of truth is deprecation of their Chief Executive.