But the issue was not personal with
them. Neither was assisting, with difficult amiability, at his own
destruction. The time came when he might have had back some of the
ground he had given. Mr. Lloyd George offered it to him. He would
not have it. What it was proposed to amend was not so much the
peace treaty as Mr. Wilson himself, and he could not admit that he
needed amendment.
The issue had become personal and Mr. Lodge, upon Mr. Wilson's
return, with malevolent understanding, kept it personal. The
Republicans made their fight in the one way that made yielding by
the President impossible. They made it nominally on the League but
really on Mr. Wilson. The President might have compromised on the
League, but he could not compromise on Mr. Wilson. Of such
involvement in self there could be only one end.
Like a poet of one poem, Mr. Wilson is a statesman of one vision,
an inspiring vision, but one which his own weakness kept him from
realizing. His domestic achievements are not remarkable, his
administration being one in which movements came to a head rather
than one in which much was initiated. He might have cut the war
short by two years and saved the world much havoc, if he had begun
to fight when the Lusitania was sunk. Once in the war he saw his
country small and himself large; he did not conceive of the nation
as winning the war by sending millions of men to France; he saw
himself as winning the war by talking across the Atlantic.
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