Selfishness is another conspicuous deforming trait of the President. He is more selfish than cruel. Undoubtedly his friends can point to many acts of generosity that deny the allegation. Some of the most selfish people in the world give freely of their counsel, money, and time. Selfishness and miserliness are not interchangeable terms. He is the summation of selfishness because he puts his decisions and determinations above those of any or all others. It matters not who the others may be. Until some one comes forward to show that he has ever been known to yield his judgments and positions to those of others I must hold to this view. He is ungenerous of sentiment and unfair by implication. Nothing better exemplifies his ungenerosity than his refusal to appear before the Senate or a committee of them previous to his return to Paris after his visit here and say to them that he had determined to incorporate all their suggestions in the Treaty and in the Covenant. He did incorporate them, but he did not give the Senate the satisfaction of telling them that he was going to do so or that the instrument would be improved by so doing. It has been said of him that he is the shrewdest politician who has been in the presidential chair in the memory of man. That is a euphemistic way of saying he knows mob psychology and individual weakness, but his reputation in this respect has been injured by his failure to be generous and gracious to Congress.
The receptive side of his nature is neither sensitive nor intuitive, nor is his reactive side productive or creative. He is merely ratiocinative and constructive, consciously excogitative and inventive. In other words, he has talent, not genius. Genius does what it must, talent what it can. The man of genius does that which no one else can do. His work is the essential and unique expression of himself. He does it without being aware how he does it. It is as much an integral part of him as the pitch of his voice and his unconscious manner. He is conscious only of the throes of productive travail; of the antecedents of his creation he is ignorant. Many artists essay to paint their own portraits and many succeed in portraying themselves spiritually and somatically as no one else can. Mr. Wilson did with words for himself in describing Jefferson Davis what artists do with pigments.
"What he did lack was wisdom in dealing with men, willingness to take the judgment of others in critical matters of business, the instinct which recognizes ability in others and trusts it to the utmost to play its independent part. He too much loved to rule, had too overweening confidence in himself, and took leave to act as if he understood much better than those who were in actual command what should be done in the field. He let prejudice and his own wilful judgment dictate to him.... He sought to control too many things with too feminine a jealousy of any rivalry in authority."
True, too true; but not nearly so true of Jefferson Davis as of Woodrow Wilson. Posterity profited by the limitations of the former, and we are paying and mankind will continue to pay for those of the latter.
Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating, and vindictive man: brilliant in conception, calculating in motive, and vindictive in execution. From the time of his youth he instructed himself to great purpose. He has made a careful review and digest of the world's history and he has attempted to survey the tractless forests and untrodden deserts of the future. From the activities in the former fields he has evolved a plan which he believes will make the latter a favorable place for the human race to display its activities, and he has striven to put that plan into practice. He concedes that others have looked backward with as comprehensive an eye as his own; he grants that others have had visions of the future that are even more penetrating than his own; but he has the opportunity to try out his plan, and they have not, and he is unwilling to take them into partnership in the development of the claim that he has staked out. He cannot do it. It is one of his emotional limitations. Were he generous, kindly, and humble it would be difficult to find his like in the flesh or in history. He must be reconciled to the frowns of his contemporaries, the disparagements of his fellows, and the scorn of those who have been scorned by him. The world has always made the possessor of limitations pay the penalty. In his hour of hurt, if sensitiveness adequate to feel is still vouchsafed him, he may assuage the pain with the knowledge that posterity will judge him by his intellectual possessions, not by his emotional deficit.
If we are not satisfied with his conduct as chief magistrate we must do one of two things. We must either curtail the powers of future presidents, or we must select presidents for their qualities of heart as well as mind. Perhaps future candidates for the presidency should be submitted to psychological tests to determine their intellectual and emotional coefficients. Those who do not measure up to a certain standard shall be eliminated.
One of the most unsurmountable obstacles to advancement of an officer in the army or navy is an annotation of his record by a superior officer as "temperamentally unfit." From the day that appears underneath his pedigree there is scarcely any power that can advance him. It may be that Woodrow Wilson has been "temperamentally unfit" to be President of the United States, but for any one to say that he has been intellectually unfit for that office is to utter an absurdity and an untruth. Had he been baptized in the waters of humility, had his parents or his pedagogues inoculated him with the vaccine of modesty, had he during the years of his spiritual growth come under the leavening influence of love of humanity, had he by taking thought been able to develop what are considered "human qualities,"—kindliness, sympathy, and reverence for others,—had he included in his matutinal prayers, "Let me accomplish, not by might, nor by power, but by spirit," had he had Lincoln's heart and his own brain, he would be, not one of the greatest men that America has produced, he might be the greatest. As it is, his emotional limitations have thwarted his career and dwarfed his spiritual stature. The American people speak of this as his fault. It is in reality his misfortune. We laugh at the child who cries when she finds that her doll, with outward appearance of pulchritude, is filled with sawdust, but we wail when we find our gods are only human, and we resent it when our humans err.
Woodrow Wilson is better liked by the people of the world to-day than any prophet or reformer the world has ever had. He has fewer enemies and fewer detractors. He should consider himself particularly fortunate, for he owes his life to it, that he lives in the twentieth century. It is only a century or two ago, in reality, that they gave up burning at the stake prophets and reformers, and it is only a few decades ago that they allowed them to remain in their native land or even to visit it. Critics and self-constituted judges of his conduct will continue to pour their vials of wrath upon his head and purge themselves of their contempt for him, but these are the fertilizers of his intellectual stature.
Woodrow Wilson has had meted out to him more considerate and respectful consideration than any man who originated stirring impulse that has led to world renovation. There is a choice between calumniation and crucifixion.