Wilson did when, having studied law and having
been admitted to the bar, he abandoned practice and went to teach
in a girls' school. That was the early sign in him of that sense of
unfitness for the more arduous contacts of life which was so
conspicuous a trait during his presidency. He could not endure
meeting men on an equal footing, where there was a conflict of
wills, a rough clash of minds, where no concession was made to
sensitiveness and egotism.
Some nervous insufficiency causes this shrinking, like the quick
retreat from cold water of an inadequate body. Commonly a man who
runs away from life after the first contact with it hates himself
for his flight and there begins a conflict inside him which ends
either in his admission of defeat and acknowledgment of his
unfitness or in his convincing himself that his real motive was
contempt of that on which he turned his back. If he admits to
himself that he is really a little less courageous, a little more
sensitive, a little less at home in this world, then he is gone. If
he does satisfy himself that he is superior, has higher ideals,
worthier ends, despises the ordinary arts of success he becomes
arrogant, merely in self defense.
Mr. Wilson's "intellectual snobbism" was this kind of arrogance,
acquired for moral self preservation, like that of the small boy
who when his companions refuse to play with him says to himself
that he is smarter than they are, gets higher marks in school, that
he has a better gun than they have or that he, when he grows up,
will be a great general while they are nobody.
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