lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"--all save one, and he the
nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with
the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has
run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but
inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in
his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he
forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great
things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the
everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is
a crisis fate produces a man big enough to meet it.

The world finds it hard to speak of Mr. Wilson except in
superlatives. A British journalist called him the other day, "the
wickedest man in the world." This was something new in
extravagance. I asked, "Why the wickedest?" He said, "Because he
was so unable to forget himself that he brought the peace of the
world down in a common smash with his own personal fortunes."

On the other hand General Jan Christian Smuts, writing with that
perspective which distance gives, pronounces it to be not Wilson's
fault but the fault of humanity that the vision of universal peace
failed. Civilization was not advanced enough to make peace without
vindictiveness possible.

This debate goes on and on. Mr. Wilson is either the worst hated or
the most regretted personality of the Great War. The place of no
one else is worth disputing. Lloyd George is the consummate
politician, limited by the meanness of his art. Clemenceau is the
personification of nationality, limited by the narrowness of his
view. Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative greatness when