Wilson. He was the human side of the
President, who for those contacts which his office demanded had
found a human side necessary and accordingly annexed the amiable
Texan.
Wilson's human side had offended him, and he cut it off,
accordingly to the scriptural injunction against the offending
right hand. The act was cruel, but it was just, as just as the
dismissal of Mr. Lansing; for House failed Wilson at Paris, being
one of Wilson's greatest sources of weakness there. His excessive
optimism, his kindheartedness, his credulity, his lack of
independence of mind, his surrender of his imagination to a
stronger imagination, his conception of politics not as morals but
as the adjustment of personal differences, left Wilson without a
capable critical adviser at the Conference.
When House talked to Wilson, it was a weaker Wilson talking to the
real Wilson. Colonel House in retirement and since the breach, is
still Colonel House, kindhearted and unobtrusive. He has seen, and
he is satisfied. He has a fine and perhaps half-unconscious loyalty
to the great man from whose shoulders he surveyed the world. His is
an ego that brushes itself off readily after a fall and asks for no
alms of sympathy.
He does not, like Mr. Lansing, fill five hundred octavo pages with
"I told you so," and you can not conceive of his using that form of
self-justification.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102