THE publication of the 'Kautsky' documents has been followed by a flood of criticism, commendation, and extenuation in the German papers, according to their respective political sympathies. At one extreme the Hamburger Nachrichten insists that the venerable Socialist leader who supervised their collection 'is no German, but a Czech,' while at the other extreme, Vorwärts reviews the Kaiser's memoranda under the caption, 'A Fool by the Grace of God.' In general the effect has been to illustrate again that German unity does not begin at home. However, the article we publish by Count Montgelas, one of the editors of the compilation, deals only with such dispassionate aspects of the subject as the methods followed by the editors and the technical difficulties they encountered. Naturally, having made their own revelation, the Germans now say to their opponents: 'Go thou and do likewise.'

But recent history has not yet sailed clear of politics in any of the recently belligerent countries. And until the two are fairly sundered, such revelations will serve mainly as material for party polemics. We see this in the review of Lord Loreburn's book which we publish in connection with the Montgelas article. The review is surely not objective, but it shows how the same controversy as to international politics that is now raging in our country has constantly bred dissension in British political history. Those who advocate national isolation and those who seek closer ties with

neighboring nations, will always be in opposite camps, whether they propose future policies or try to interpret the history of the war.

RESPONSIBILITY for the outbreak of the war appears to interest the German public less than responsibility for the conduct of the war and particularly for certain of its phases, like the submarine campaign, which brought about the decisive intervention of America. Even victorious combatants are prone to review the faults of their commanders. If we recall rightly, the conduct of the Civil War was at one time the subject of a prolonged investigation at Washington. Great Britain has recently made public reports upon its early failures at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. The parliamentary inquiry now being conducted in Germany is resolving itself into an investigation of this character. We shall take opportunity in an early issue to give some account of these proceedings as they appear to the nation most directly interested in their revelations.

War history is present politics in Germany. It continues to be one of the live issues between reaction and reform. Therefore, it is doubtful whether such inquiries will be sufficiently free from party bias-to say nothing of national bias-to command the confidence of future historians. But these inquiries continue to make political capital for the revolution, because they discredit the former popular heroes and their ideals.

So be it. I hear the complaint and I reply. I detest prefaces, but am much interested in post-faces- at least in theory, for I actually know of very few. Authors have short memories for the works they have completed, and in any case they take little interest in studying the wrinkles and defects of those old friends.

I shall write, along with a 'post-face' for my old book, a prospectus of a new book to be written at a more favorable moment, where I shall describe the days of trial of my hero, of my unhappy chief, the days that helped to wreck his health and to destroy his work.

I first became interested in Wilson in the spring of 1916. He was then the object of general attack. He made the somewhat ridiculous figure of a pacifist involved in a row, where he receives on his own back the very blows that he would prevent. He was incessantly publishing new notes. His typewriter had become a common joke. He was caricatured tapping its keys face to face with Kaiser Wilhelm, who was training cannon on him. All these pleasantries and insults seemed to me premature. I am not naturally hostile to the heads of governments, but try to judge them leniently. I pity them

for the hard position in which they find themselves. I admire that disposition which inspires them to attack problems that are clearly insoluble, and to seek to use for profitable ends the fleeting passions of the populace. It is an indispensable vocation. It is not one for which I am fitted. I gladly withdraw in favor of others, and have no quarrel with them for their taste.

I then felt, and I still feel, consideration and pity for this college professor, this man of modest presence, whom the chances of an election and the hazard of a triangular political contest in which he did not receive a majority of votes, invested with the highest of offices, at the most tragic moment in the greatest cyclone that ever devastated the political world. What did people criticize? His pulpit style? But why so? Every nation, and above all, every democracy has its peculiar method of expression, its idealism, and if you will, its hypocrisy. Let us not pretend to be affronted by it. What other criticisms have people to make? That he did not declare war. That appears to me both inconsiderate and unjust. Inconsiderate, for our desire that he should do so was too keen to leave our judgment unbiased; unjust, because both our eagerness and our ignorance forbade our appreciating the tremendous problems faced by the men responsible for the great task of directing the American people. Did I say men? I should have said man. Mr. Wilson alone was responsible. He alone was the one called upon to act.

What sort of a man was he? I was anxious to know. I read his biographies and everything that he had written. I was surprised to discover that this pietist, this prophet, was at heart a clear-headed realist. He was a realist by habit of thought, a jurist profoundly conversant with the laws of his country, a historian enlightened upon the causes and the justice of wars and convinced that it was right to employ force. He was a realist by temperament, the ruler of a nation, the president of a republic, who conducted affairs of state with skill and resolution and success. Having learned this much, my interest in the study of this personality centred in one question. How are the idealist and the realist in Mr. Wilson related? How are these two antagonistic sides of his nature, one turned toward the outer world, the other toward the silence of his soul, to be reconciled? To have seen this problem and to have stated it clearly was doubtless my most valuable service, and it places me in a position to resume my task and complete it at some future time along the lines I have already sketched.

I suggested an answer at that time. I believed that the realist dominated the idealist. I saw this cold, prudent, persistent man slowly-very slowly indeed, for that is a fault of AngloSaxons, but wisely and skillfully working out his ideas as a sort of super-demagogue. A sentence in his book upon The State had impressed me: He said that nations are groups capable of developing tremendous powers of progress or resistance. That the rule of majorities was an invention of the modern world, and that the art of statesmanship was to arouse, sustain, and direct this new force. I saw Mr. Wilson practising the very art which he had so well defined.

I formed this hypothesis at a happy

moment. The course of events had not yet demonstrated its truth, but they were on the point of doing so in a brilliant manner. I told my friends, ‘This man is no dreamer. He is no pacifist. He will make war and he will pursue it to the bitter end, for he is a man of obstinate determination.' My friends would not listen to me. They were wrong. I was right. I concluded my book with a reference to President Wilson's speech of July, 1917, immediately after the declaration of war, in which he vigorously predicted things which most people still refused to see. He said that America was ready to call to its colors thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of men. Not many of his fellow citizens really thought this would be done. Who was there in France at that moment who really believed that millions of Americans would come to shed their blood on our own soil? I recall that in spite of the assiduous study that had pointed out to me a path to truth, I myself hardly dared to believe this. But I was listening to the words of a man who spoke with irresistible persuasion. I refused to give up hope. I wrote in support of my opinion during the darkest months that France has ever experienced, and if my book reveals the fervor of the propagandist, if certain expressions are somewhat forced or overdrawn, I say frankly that I am neither surprised nor embarrassed nor repentant. That magnificent tide of American youth that swept across mourning France in July, 1918, was due to the energy and the foresight of President Wilson alone. I am grateful to him, and I admire him for it.

This does not mean that I regard him as a man of first calibre. A truly great man is something differentsomething peculiarly rare. I have never viewed nor described Mr. Wilson

my

ent

no elasticity of spirit, no clarity of vision in the higher regions of the mind. Worse than that, his mind seems to me hardly to possess such higher regions. His purely humanitarian theology, after all, leaves us cold. It lacks inspiration. Mr. Wilson is a man with narrow boundaries. The estimate which I formed of him and which inspired my description, is of a politician, an expert in a certain trade, capable and efficient in his specialty.

Two years have passed. What has become of my hero? For a time he carried everything before him. That will remain permanently to his credit. But after the task of war came the more delicate task of peace. What was he aiming at? What did he desire? We do not clearly know. We are brought face to face with this strange fusion of realism and idealism so difficult to elucidate and comprehend. Our embarrassment is increased by the President's vacillation. He does not seem to be complete master of the great ideal which was of such service to him in 1917. His words have evoked it; his rhetoric has carried away the people. But he has raised hopes which he cannot fulfill and created situations which he cannot control. Is he, like the magician in the Thousand and One Nights, a prisoner and a victim of the forces which he has conjured? Or again, was he captivated by his own idealism, carried away by his own propaganda, dazzled by his papal rôle, so as to become the mere servant of his formulas? Another possibility. He has a certain gift of logic, of system. Has

this possibly impaired his clearness of vision and his tactical skill? Still another thought. May not the slight tendency to self-worship-a failing from which he is not exempt - have carried him away from securer moorings? The answer to all this lies in obscurity. The history of the Peace Conference is unknown. Long labor and minute study will be necessary to reveal the truth.

Meanwhile, I stick to my theory and search a solution by its light. I still think that Wilson the realist rules Wilson the idealist. I think that Wilson the realist wished to assure the permanent predominance of America in the affairs of Europe, Africa, and Asia. I think that he planned to ally his country with England and France in such a way as to make it the master influence in the group, and thus to insure peace to the world an AngloSaxon peace or an allied peace and not a visionary peace. But America, ignorant of these great purposes, still cherishing its isolation, was not ripe for such a radical change of policy. Its traditions and habits, its political indolence, and its old instinctive desire to keep clear of European embroilments, were too strong to be overcome. President Wilson tried to lead his country into the path of this new peace as he had led it into the path of war, by again employing those methods of a political Messiah which had succeeded so brilliantly before. That is why he desired that the Covenant of the League of Nations should be an integral part of the Treaty, and of the alliance with France. America, taken by surprise, is trying to resist these new entanglements. We do not know yet whether it will succeed.

Is President Wilson going to fail? Quite possibly. The Treaty and the League of Nations may fall together, but even in that case I do not grant

that his defeat means his humiliation. From 1912 to 1917, as the leader of a nation in what was already becoming a formidable crisis, he proved his strength. But the crisis has since become both more formidable and more delicate. While at Paris President Wilson had the double task of participating in the Peace Conference and governing a people already rebelling against his leadership. The Republican majority in the Senate blocked his policies, while the French were blind enough to chant victory over his defeat. President Wilson lost support on every hand. He faced enemies from all directions. In May, 1918, the Senate demanded that he leave Paris and withdraw from the Conference, and threatened a parliamentary strike. He actually left Paris for a short period. He presented himself in Washington, and defied his adversaries to carry out their threats. At the end of eight days he again left his country and remained at Paris to the end, in spite of an opposition of which we can measure neither the violence nor the strategy, and in which pro-Germans were constantly involved. He remained to the end and fought to the limit of his strength, and beyond those limits, in order to prevent his country from returning to its ancient isolation and its former narrow policies. Most assuredly I am not ready to join those who affect to despise so resolute and so robust a champion.

Consideration and respect are the sentiments which rise in my heart whenever my thoughts turn to this man, whom a hard fate predestined to shoulder one of the heaviest burdens in history and to attempt simultaneously to solve the problems of the Old World and the New.

Mr. Wilson wrote in 1910 a book entitled Constitutional Government in the United States, in which he uses an

interesting sentence to which I have referred in my own book. In examining the functions of the President and the conditions under which they are exercised, he pointed out one of the dangers which they involve. Their burden, he says, tends to become so heavy as to crush the man who bears them.

Men of moderate strength cannot sustain this office, in Mr. Wilson's opinion, and, therefore, the people will always be obliged to choose their first magistrate from those who unite with wisdom and prudence great physical vitality. Their number is very small. President Wilson was for a long time one of these political athletes. He was able to carry the burden of American government. But when he had to carry a double burden, the Old World and the New, he succumbed under the weight.

Who would have done better? Perhaps no one. Possibly it is a characteristic of the age which we are now entering that the problems presented to mankind will be beyond their capacity to solve. For human limitations are fixed; human power does not grow. But the forces which mankind controls do not cease to multiply and to become more complex. Renan, in his Dialogues Philosophes, foresaw this possibility and pointed it out. He writes: 'A great danger impends because the accumulation of knowledge and power is unlimited, while the human intellect does not expand. There is reason to fear that the human brain may collapse under its own burden; that there may come a moment when its very progress spells its ultimate decadence. It will be like an equation that carries its limits within its own statement.' It is rather in the spirit of this serious prediction than with a feeling of disparagement, that I picture President Wilson's difficulties.