Idling in Italy: Studies of literature and of life

by Joseph Collins

He is an idealist and theorist. He is the kind of idealist who destroyed the Democratic machine in the State of New Jersey, which had been the synonym for corruption in politics for a generation; the kind of idealist who put through the Underwood Tariff Bill, which at one stroke did more to strangle the unnatural mother of privilege than any measure in the past twenty years; the kind of idealist who, when the transport system of the entire country threatened to be hopelessly paralyzed by reason of the determination of the railway magnates to refuse the demands of locomotive engineers that their working-day should consist of eight hours, sent for representatives of the plutocrats and the proletariats and told what they were to do and when they were to do it, and the whole civilized world approved. He is the idealist who has done more to make our government a republican government representative of the people and not of party bosses than any one in the memory of man. He is the idealist who is a scholar, a thinker, a statesman, a creator, an administrator, and a man of vision. More than that, he is an efficiency expert in the realm of world-ordering. It is to our inestimable misfortune that his personality has successfully obstacled his projects.

His secretary of war is a failure; his secretary of state is a figurehead; his secretary of finance is his family, and so on ad nauseam.

I am not a competent judge whether Mr. Baker has been a good secretary of war or not, but I am sure that he is not so unfit as Simon Cameron was. No one has said of him: "Cameron is utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things and probable result. Selfish and openly discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the country. Incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and executing general plans" (Nicolay). President Wilson has never had to say of any of his cabinet what Lincoln said of Seward: "The point and pith of the senators' complaint was that they charged him, Seward, if not with infidelity, with indifference, with want of earnestness in the war, with want of sympathy with the country, and especially with a too great ascendancy and control of the President and measures of administration. While they seemed to believe in my honesty, they also appeared to think that when I had in me any good purpose or intention Seward tried to suck it out of me unperceived."

So far as I know, no one has characterized President Wilson's mentality as "painful imbecility," as Stanton characterized Lincoln a few months before the latter appointed him secretary of war.

He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation during the period when the country was emerging from the position of aloofness from world politics which it had maintained from the time Washington warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that the President has given him because his training has been as a stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is not the kind of training that one would give his son whom he wished to see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral possessions that he selected could do better than any one else.

What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any public man in the United States displayed that justifies self-constituted critics in saying that the men selected by President Wilson are not their peers? It is universally admitted that President Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in America, using that word in its conventional, every-day sense and meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the "machine," than any President ever had. No one denies his statesmanship. He is, therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world weal for worldly advancement, and who lash themselves into a frenzied state by repetition of the admonitions of Washington or Monroe. It does not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the lustre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles that they enunciated and the practices that they initiated centuries ago are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of Hippocrates or Galen, because the one was the father of medicine and the other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow slavishly the teachings of Washington and Monroe.

That the American Peace Commission did not contain men of the mental caliber of Mr. Root or Mr. Lodge, that the reservoirs of expert knowledge were not drained and taken to Paris, that our Commission as a whole was less sophisticated, less perceptive and apperceptive, than that of Great Britain, let us say, is to be regretted, just as we regret the effects of some fallacious judgment or specious decision of our youth. There were ways of offsetting them, however, and in this particular instance Congress was the way. The President did not go beyond his prerogative in selecting the Peace Commission. The public elected him to make these selections, as well as to do other things. If the people do not want that such selection should be his privilege and power, they have only to say it at the polls. The Eighteenth Amendment was not difficult of accomplishment. Perhaps time will show that Mr. Wilson "guessed right" oftener in the selection of his cabinet than any predecessor.

Mr. Josephus Daniels was the target of scorn and the butt of ridicule from the time he went into the cabinet until he began to make preparations for war, but the rumor has reached me that his efforts were fairly satisfactory to the hypercritical American public. The President's critics are jealous of the prodigious powers which an unauthorized representative of the government has in the affairs of the country, and they do not understand why, if he is the paragon of virtue that his position seems to indicate he is, the President did not put him on the commission. But again I say the President knows his limitations and the public has only recently discovered them. He may short-circuit some of them by means of Colonel House. He may find him "great in counsel and mighty in work," or he may have habituated himself to buy only gold that he has tried in the fire himself. It is his privilege and no one can gainsay it.

He is silent and ungetatable. Silence has been considered a sign of strength in man since the days of Hammurabi, and the greater the man the more solitary he is. If Mr. Wilson were twice as great, even Mr. Tumulty would not be allowed to see him!

Wilson has been accused of pilfering his idea of the League of Nations from the Duc de Sully and from the Abbé of Saint Pierre. Enemies animated by malice and fired by envy have striven to show that the famous fourteen statements or principles were his only by the right of possession or enunciation; that he resurrected the doctrines of Mazzini, dressed them up and paraded them as his own. It would be difficult to be patient with such critics if one did not know the history of epoch-making events in the world's progress. In truth, the public is resentful that it was not consulted. It is umbraged that it was not allowed to make suggestions. It is spiteful because it was treated with contempt. The public manifested the same quality of spleen toward Lincoln, only the quantity was greater. In brief, the public professes not to have any confidence in Mr. Wilson's wisdom, and this in face of the fact that up to date he has displayed more wisdom than all the Solons in America combined, and I can say this the more unprejudicedly as a Republican than I could if I were a member of the party that elected Mr. Wilson.