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to spell a curtailment of American financial assistance to Europe. Nouveau Siècle said it was typical of America's present mentality, and that Americans, 'intoxicated with the dollars that fill their coffers, imagine that the world belongs to them.' Figaro, which rather sedulously cultivates Franco-American amity, hastened to characterize the report, upon the strength of the version received at Paris, as the 'most hostile and perfidious testimony' ever given by a responsible American diplomatist against France. These ebullitions subsided upon the receipt of reassuring advices from Washington, though not without bitter after-comment upon the sensationalism said to characterize our diplomatic news service, with indirect allusions to our tumultuous Mexican negotiations as an example nearer home. Indeed, one French paper predicted that, if the good rela

tions of Europe and America were thus put to the test too often, 'the rift will some day become an open rupture.'

MINOR NOTES

EVER since the Dayton trial the European press has exhibited a revived interest in the Christendom-wide conflict -and we might perhaps include the world of Islam in the generalization between Fundamentalism and Modernism. The Outlook cautions its readers that 'we in Europe must not feel too superior to the Americans. We have our own literal interpreters of the Bible. In "civilized" Holland only the other day a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church was suspended by the General Synod because in a sermon he expressed doubts as to whether the serpent had actually spoken to Eve as represented in Genesis.'

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WILSON'S GRAY CARDINAL1

BRITISH REVIEWS OF THE HOUSE MEMOIRS

BY SYDNEY BROOKS AND J. L. GARVIN

I

THESE Volumes are the record of a career unique in America, and not easily paralleled anywhere. They trace the steps by which a Texan of no particular wealth or prominence became, first, the unseen dictator of the politics of his State, then the confidential adviser of a President of the United States on all matters of domestic and foreign policy, and finally the unofficial but extremely representative envoy from Washington to the Governments of Europe during the war. Forty-odd years are covered by the narrative, and in the whole of that time Colonel House has never held an office, never made a public speech, never willingly stepped an inch beyond the obscurity that he prefers for his own comfort and the efficiency of his work.

Inevitably his countrymen have labeled him a man of mystery. But his personality as it emerges from these pages is not mysterious at all. It is singular, it is interesting, but it is neither secretive nor elusive. Born to independent means, he happened to make a hobby of politics and travel. The 'governing of men' and all the complex factors that enter into it took

1 From the Sunday Times (London pro-French Sunday paper), March 7, and the Observer (London Independent Sunday paper), March 7

an early and passionate hold of him. But he has run his hobby, not to advertise himself or to become a public and recognized power, but to produce results and let others get the credit for them. From youth he seems to have had, not only an enthusiasm for good government, but the perseverance and the insight to become a master of the arts of getting it.

"The path which House laid out for himself,' says Professor Seymour, the editor of his papers, 'was entirely untrodden, and it is fruitless to seek an historical parallel. Monarchs had shared their secrets with father confessors and extracted wisdom from their advice; presidents had created their kitchen cabinets. But neither the one nor the other suggests the unofficial functions which House exercised. He was a combination of Richelieu's Father Joseph and Thurlow Weed, but he was very much more. At the same time that he played the part of adviser to the President, of buffer between office-seekers and Cabinet, of emissary to foreign courts, he indulged in a complex of activities that kept him in close touch with business men, local politicians, artists and journalists, lawyers and college professors. His intimacy with European statesmen was as close and his friend

ship as warm as the personal associations he created at home. Long after the war, when their political relations had become ancient history, he visited Grey and Plunkett, Clemenceau and Paderewski. Long after the Democrats lost power in the United States, the officials of Great Britain, France, and Germany sought his advice. His range of contacts was so great that he became a sort of clearing house for all who desired to accomplish something.

But to play the rôle of the invisible right-hand man, to be the counselor and the manipulator behind the scenes, much more is needed than honesty. The other qualities that have enabled Colonel House to become a power in local, national, and international politics show themselves one by one in these enthralling pages. He has an extraordinarily quick feeling for atmosphere and the play of events. As a diagnostician of public opinion in his own country I should place him in a class by himself. He has that proleptic sense of how things will strike people in the mass that you sometimes find in journalists of the first order. But in Colonel House it is united with the gift, first, of originating the move or the policy, secondly, of planning the ways and means of its execution, and, thirdly, of judging to a turn and in advance its political reactions.

In these two volumes of his intimate papers one sees him at work on his chosen hobby, 'the governing of men,' from those early days in Texas when he was the hidden hand in State politics, through the great stir of events that brought Mr. Wilson to the White House with the Colonel as the chief of his secret Cabinet, and onward through the first brilliant year of his presidency, the troubles in Mexico, and the engulfing catastrophe of the European War. One sees him selecting governors, laying down plans

of campaign, suggesting policies and working them up-Colonel House leaves nothing to chance - into practicable measures, advising on cabinet appointments, staving off friction, taking soundings in South American and European politics, acting as the eyes and ears of the President at home and abroad, negotiating with the statesmen and rulers of the belligerent Powers.

They are all set down in these two volumes with a frankness that sometimes startles. Colonel House saw more of the inside of the war, and from more angles, than any other man in the world, and his day-to-day diary, and his confidential letters to the President, have a human and an historical value and interest that hold one, or, at any rate, have held me, from the first page to the last. Compared with any other American of the war period or with any except Mr. Page - he shows up as a real statesman, even though some of the forces that brought his peace missions and his diplomacy to a seemingly fruitless end were forces that he never quite succeeded in gauging correctly. The European situation in 1915 and 1916 had got beyond the control of any negotiator, even one so trusted and resourceful and reasonable as himself.

As a matter of fact, I cannot away with the impression that Colonel House's incursions into European politics frequently took him beyond his depth. In America, in all senses, he was far more at home. The work that he did in Texas, in promoting Mr. Wilson's candidature, in helping to eliminate Mr. Bryan, in suggesting the right tactics at the nominating convention, in choosing the Cabinet, and in supervising much of the spade-work connected with the President's legislative programme, was thoroughly sound. There the environment was familiar

and the problems easier, and the services that Colonel House was able to render to Mr. Wilson were of the most genuine value. But it is worth noting that when he ventured into the more perilous field of foreign affairs, even though they were affairs confined to the American hemisphere, his success was not invariable. His proposed pact between all the American republics lapsed into nothing, and he was never able to steer the Administration's Mexican policy along practical lines.

What he undertook to do in Europe before and after the war was naturally ten times more difficult. These volumes detail his interesting but abortive effort to bring France and Germany and Great Britain to some sort of understanding before the war. Colonel House had a premonition of the coming catastrophe, and he felt that America could not disinterest herself. But the story of his visit to the Kaiser and of his talks with Sir Edward Grey and of his scheme for warding off the danger has in it a decided note of amateurishness, and this in spite of the fact that he saw the situation clearly enough and could weigh most of the ponderable factors. It was the tangled background behind the present and the color it had given to everything that sometimes eluded him. But inevitably when the war came President Wilson turned to Colonel House as the man best qualified to report upon the position and to suggest the lines of policy. There is much that is new in these revelations of his visit in 1915 and his conferences with the statesmen of the three leading belligerent Powers. Among other things, Colonel House appears as the author of the phrase 'the freedom of the seas,' and as recommending the policy it embodied to the British Government. It was not a fortunate recommendation. It had the defect that the Colonel rarely

showed in his purely American activities it was inopportune and jarring. The far more determined effort that he made in the following year to induce the belligerents to come to terms forms a series of vivid chapters in these volumes. Most Englishmen, I imagine, will be surprised to discover how much countenance and encouragement he received from the heads of the British Cabinet. It amounted almost to overencouragement; it gave Colonel House a mistaken estimate of the possibilities of success. The passions of ten years ago have died away by now, but there is still something cold-blooded in the spectacle of Colonel House cajoling and threatening the belligerents alternately, trying to induce peace by showing each side in turn that further obstinacy in the matter might provoke American intervention. Europe was a shambles, and he was treating it as a chessboard. It was none of his business, of course, to see red, but he could not easily enter into the feelings of those who were seeing not merely red but crimson. I doubt whether he ever realized that the ministers and rulers with whom he parleyed were mere straws on the surging torrent of national passion. The Colonel, I fear, would have been given short shrift had the peoples whose capitals he visited and whose officials he interviewed known the purpose of his comings and goings. The sane, collected neutral pointing out pointing out quite unanswerablythe folly of the whole proceeding and explaining how easily matters could be adjusted if only everyone would be as sane and collected as himself would scarcely, in 1916, have been a popular figure in any of the warring lands.

Moreover, his diplomacy was vitiated by the incurable skepticism of President Wilson's capacity for action that obtained everywhere in Europe. All that Colonel House could promise was

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that if the President called a conference of the belligerents, and if Germany refused while the Allies agreed to accept it, then the United States would 'probably' enter the war against Germany. Again, if the conference were summoned, and if all the belligerents attended it, and if it failed to secure peace, and if Germany were 'unreasonable,' then also the same simulacrum of a result would be produced that is to say, the United States would 'probably' leave the conference as a fighter on the side of the Allies. Not a very firm offer, that. A man much less agile-minded than Mr. Wilson, much less of a casuist, and much less given to talking rather than doing, would have seen at once that it committed him to nothing and imposed no obligations that he could not have dodged. And when one remembers that a year later, and after infinite provocation, the President had almost to be kicked into the war, it does not seem likely that in March 1916 he would gratuitously have wriggled into it by any such roundabout route.

II

'FATHER JOSEPH was no fool, and the Cardinal never took a step without him.' Thus Tallemant in his delightful repertory of biographical impertinences. Since Richelieu's great agent in wars and negotiations, nearly three hundred years ago, there has been nothing in history like the case of the quiet little man from Texas. He became one of the chief personages in Europe as well as in America, and used his potent influence over President Wilson to change the fortunes of the world. But for Colonel House, America might never have entered the war. But for him there might have been no League of Nations, and no abrupt termination of Britain's old independent sovereignty

of the seas. Could he have held his principal to the end, there might have been a better peace and a happier sequel. That large speculation is another story to be told in future volumes. The record breaks off with America's plunge into the struggle amid unrestricted submarine-warfare.

In everything but name these volumes are Colonel House's personal memoirs, and they make an extraordinary book certain to keep for always an outstanding place in the endless archives of the war. We are not thinking only of the political confessions, though these disclose the most secret passages of diplomacy and the most private of personal intercourse. The thing is equally extraordinary as a human document. On that side, none but an American can criticize it with sufficient freedom. The controversy unchained in the United States must be left to work for the increase of our knowledge. On the whole, Colonel House is what students of history know as a 'diminisher,' like Saint-Simon. Devoted to President Wilson, he somehow lessens more and more the figure of his hero. An admirer of Lord Grey, he rather tends to reduce the estimate of that statesman. He sees the faults of Mr. Lloyd George much better than the qualities. All Europe of the mighty efforts and sacrifices, the passions and the agonies, appears smaller and more sinful than in fact it was. This only increases the interest. Every confession and disclosure raises a new psychological enigma. We are left wondering deeply what was the inmost truth about Woodrow Wilson and about Colonel House himself.

The personal story beggars fiction; no novelist would have dared to imagine it. It is the tale of a sudden Monte Cristo, not of money, but of power. 'We originally came from

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