nations. Lawyers were pitiful creatures,—he kept one of them near him, Mr. Lansing, admirably chosen, to remind him of how contemptible they were, living in fear of precedents, writing a barbarous jargon out of deeds and covenants, impeding the freedom of the imagination with their endless citations.

He despised politicians, he despised business men, he despised the whole range of men who pursue worldly arts with success. He despised the qualities which he had not himself, but like all men who are arrogant self protectively he was driven to introspection and analyzed himself pitilessly.

The public got glimpses of these analyses. Sometimes he called that something in him which left him less fit for the world than the average, a little regretfully, "his single track mind." Sometimes it leaped to light as an object of pride, his arrogance again, a pride that was "too great to fight," like the common run of men,—in the law courts or on the battlefields. He kept asking himself the question, "Why am I not as other men are?", and sometimes his nature would rise up in protest and he would exclaim that he was as other men were and would pathetically tell the world that he was "misunderstood," that he was not cold and reserved but warm and genial and kindly, only largely because the world would see him as he was.

But always the one safe recourse, the one assurance of personal stability was arrogance. Contempt was the most characteristic habit of his mind. Out of office he is no sage looking charitably at the fumbling of his successor.

A friend who has seen him since his retirement describes him as watching "with supreme contempt" the executive efforts of Mr. Harding. Washington gossip credits him with inventing the phrase, "the bungalow mind," to describe the present occupant of the White House. Another remark of his about the new President is said to have been "I look forward to the new administration with no unpleasant anticipations, except those caused by Mr. Harding's literary style."

There is always his contrast of others with himself to their disadvantage, mentally or morally, as writers, or leaders, or statesmen. So full a life as Mr. Wilson led in the last dozen or more years ought to have made him less self-conscious. A robuster person would have hated with a certain zest, continued with a certain gaiety, laughed as he fought, found something to respect in his foes, seen the curtain fall upon his own activities with a certain cheerfulness.

He seems deficient in resources. He had not that gusto which richly endowed natures ordinarily have. He found no fun in measuring his strength with other men's. There was a certain overstrain about him, which made him cushion himself about with non-resistant personalities. He lacked curiosity. His fine mind seemed to want the energy to interest itself in the details of any subject that filled it, and this was one of his fatal weaknesses at the Peace Conference. Perhaps it was a deficiency of vital force. Moreover he came to his great task tired. His life till he was past fifty was one of defeat. There was the early disappointment and turning back from law practice, the giving up of his youthful ambition for a public career to which he had trained himself passionately by the study of public speaking. Dr. Albert Shaw, who was his fellow student at Johns Hopkins, says that in the University Mr. Wilson was the finest speaker, except possibly the old President of the College, Dr. Daniel Coit Gilman.

Then there were the long years of poverty as a college professor, when he overworked at writing and university extension lectures, to make his small salary as a teacher equal to the support of his family, his three children and his aged parents. There was his failure at literature, for his "History of the United States" brought him neither fame nor money, the public finding it dull and unreadable.

Then the crowning unsuccess as President of Princeton; for when his luck changed and a political career opened to him as Governor of New Jersey, with trustees and alumni against him, nothing seemed to be before him but resignation and a small professorship in a Southern College. It was a straightened life that he had led when he came to Washington for the first time as President, scandalizing the servants of the White House with the scantness of his personal effects. There had been neither the time nor the means nor probably the energy for larger human contacts. And something inherent always held him back from the world, something which diverted him to academic life, which when he was writing his "Congressional Government", his best book, held him in Baltimore, almost a suburb of Washington, where he read what he wrote to his fellow-students at Johns Hopkins, whose livelier curiosity took them often to the galleries of the House and the Senate about which he was writing from a distance.

Those to whom life is kinder than it was during many years to Mr. Wilson have naturally a zest for it. Robuster natures than his even though life averts her face, often preserve a zest for it. Conscious of his powers he seems to have fortified himself against failure with scorn. He had a scorn for the intellects of those who succeed by arts which he did not possess. He had scorn for politicians. He had a scorn for wealth. He had a scorn for his enemies. He had a scorn for Republicans. He had a scorn for the men with whom he had to deal in Europe, the heads of the Allied Governments.

Above all he scorned Lloyd George, an instinct telling him that the British Premier had a thousand arts where he himself, unschooled in conference with equals, had none. He said of Lloyd George just before he sailed for Paris, suspecting him of treachery to the League of Nations, "I shall look him in the eye and say to him Damn you, if you do not accept the League I shall go to the people of Great Britain and say things to them that will shake your government."

When he made this threat he could not foresee that the compromise of the Peace would leave him with so little character that British Liberals, their faith destroyed, should in the end couple his name with their own Premier's and exclaim, "Your man Wilson talks like Jesus Christ, but he acts like Lloyd George!"

More than all others he scorned Lodge. The Massachusetts Senator who had put by scholarship for politics and had won the opportunity to do menial service for a political machine hated the man who had chosen scholarship, for whatever motive, and come out with the Presidency. You hate the man you might perhaps have been if you had chosen more boldly, more according to your heart—if you are like Mr. Lodge.

A life of demeaning himself to politicians, of waiting for dead men's shoes in the Senate, had, however, brought some compensations to Lodge, among others an inordinate capacity to hurt. The Massachusetts Senator could get under the President's skin as no other man could. Washington is a place where every whisper is heard in the White House.

Mr. Lodge's favorite private charge uttered in a tone of withering scorn was that the President failed to respond as a man would to the national insult offered by Germany in sinking the Lusitania because there was something womanish about him and he would tell, to prove it, how Wilson went white and almost collapsed over the news that blood had been shed through the landing of American marines at Vera Cruz.

The President hardly failed to hear this. Perhaps it reminded him of that something in him which he was always trying to forget, that something which diverted his life toward failure at the outset, which once betrayed him, with a strange mixture of the arrogance and inferiority, into his famous words "too proud to fight."

At any rate mutual comprehension and hatred between these two men was instinctive, each having the opposite choice in the beginning and neither in his heart perhaps ever having forgiven himself wholly for his choice. Mr. Wilson could never get Mr. Lodge wholly out of his mind in the last two years of his Presidency, a