The White House,
Washington, D. C.
15 August, 1919.
YOUR HOLINESS:
I have had the pleasure of receiving at the hands of Monsignor Cossio the recent letter you were kind enough to write me, which I now beg to acknowledge with sincere appreciation. Let me assure you that it was with the greatest pleasure that I lent my influence to safeguarding the missionary interests to which you so graciously refer, and I am happy to say that my colleagues in the Conference were all of the same mind in this wish to throw absolute safeguards around such missions and to keep them within the influences under which they had hitherto been conducted.
I have read with the gravest interest your suggestion about the treatment which should be accorded the ex-Kaiser of Germany and the military officers of high rank who were associated with him in the war, and beg to say that I realize the force of the considerations which you urge. I am obliged to you for setting them so clearly, and shall hope to keep them in mind in the difficult months to come. With much respect and sincere good wishes for your welfare,
Respectfully and sincerely yours,
(Signed) WOODROW WILSON.
His Holiness,
Pope Benedict XV.
[Illustration: Correspondence with the Pope (Transcriber's note: contains a reproduction of the two above-quoted letters.)]
There was something too fine in his nature for the dramatics and the posturings of the political game, as it is usually played. He is a very shy man, too sincere to pose, too modest to make advances. He craves the love of his fellow-men with all his heart and soul. People see only his dignity, his reserve, but they cannot see his big heart yearning for the love of his fellow-men. Out of that loving heart of his has come the passion which controlled his whole public career—the passion for justice, for fair dealing, and democracy.
Never during the critical days of the war, when requests of all kinds poured in upon him for interviews of various sorts, did he lose his good- nature. Nor did he show that he was disturbed when various requests came from this or that man who claimed to have discovered some scientific means of ending the war.