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. Almost everyone who
feels himself unequal in some direction can satisfy himself that he
exceeds in others. It is a common and human sort of arrogance, and
Mr. Wilson had it inordinately.

He hated and contemned the law, in which life had given him his
first glimpse of his frailty. He would have no lawyers make the
peace or draft the covenant of the league of 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