This, I think, the country will contest.
He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Nations. If not his own discovery
he has yet made himself its leader. He talks flippantly about "American
ideals" that have won the war against Germany, as if there were no English
ideals and French ideals.
"In all that he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at the
front rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record and
mark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental and
temperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resolute
intellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; of
the half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself a
doctrinaire when he is in point of fact only a disciple."
Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophisticated culture of the too, too
solid South. Had he grown up in England a hundred years ago he would have
been a follower of the Della Cruscans. He has what is called a facile pen,
though it sometimes runs away with him. It seems to have done so in the
matter of the League of Nations. Inevitably such a scheme would catch the
fancy of one ever on the alert for the fanciful.
I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin,
disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and no
artificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly the
costliness of war that makes most against it.
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