Permissible Opinions of the President

Mosaics of Mr, Wilson Derived Exclusively From Private Conversation

L. L. JONES

CARELESS though our speech may be, almost any other topic of conversation than the character of President Wilson does impose some sort of mental restraint even on a middle-aged member of this club, talking for no man's pleasure but his own. If, for example, he insists on describing every course of every dinner he has lately eaten, he may be, for all his hearer cares, wholly inaccurate, but his remarks must be in a general way applicable to food. He must not describe the dinner as a baseball game. If he is speaking of his dog, he may tell as many lies as he chooses, but they must all be lies about a dog. Should he in a dreamy moment describe that animal as a giraffe, or refer abstractedly to his feathers or his fins, a spirit of criticism would be awakened. No matter how little the listener may be interested in the talk, he is sure to notice it, if the talker becomes conspicuously deranged.

This is not true when one is talking about the character of the President. At least it is not true here.

IF you feel toward the character of the President as your hearer feels, you may say anything. In the group that talks against the character of the President in the southeast corner of the main room from five-thirty to six forty-five, you are permitted to remark that, but for the character of the President, there never would have been a European war.

In the group that talks in favor of the President's character in the northeast corner of the smoking room from eight-thirty to nine fortyfive, you are permitted to remark that, but for the character of the President there never could be a European peace. Nobody in either corner notices anything wrong with you. On the contrary, your little offering is welcomed by each group and you may renew it almost every evening. If a demented person could confine himself exclusively to talking for or against the character of the President, I could place him in a group of members by whom his unfortunate personal infirmity would not be noticed for years to come, perhaps never.

Some people maintain that there must be qualities actually existing in the character of the President that correspond to what is said about it in private conversation. I have lately emerged from a rather animated private conversation, and I will put it to the test. The view of the character and abilities of the President expressed by these particular conversers happened to be the dark one. Piecing together the elements which they all agreed to as one man, I am able to offer this mosaic of Mr. Wilson's personality:

THE most pig-headed man that was ever prominent in public life, probably the most pig-headed in the universe, and hostile to any idea that does not originate with himself, he will change an opinion with disgusting suddenness, and you never can tell what halfbaked thought of a soft-boiled radical he is going to swallow next. Cold, self-centered, repellent, tactless, and totally lacking in the knowledge of men, he is a consummate politician. Indeed, he is nothing but a politician and of rather a common breed. He is a pacifist at heart, and the more dangerous for being subject to violent jingo fits—the sort of pacifist that is likely to shout in times of peace, "We must have the biggest navy in the world." Though grossly indiscreet, he never acts from impulse, but always from coldly calculated self-interest. He is a time-server, but forever losing his head. He will rip out some rash phrase like "peace without a victory" at which even he is afterwards surprised.

In him the low animal cunning of the votegetter is blended with the aloofness of the academic mind, and he has led a life of intellectual isolation while scrambling into power on the backs of his friends. His only pleasures are golf, flattery, the repelling of intelligent visitors, and the incessant practice of an almost Germanic inveracity. Though an extremely cautious man, the lies he tells are boisterously self-evident and when he breaks a promise, as he does every day or two, you can almost hear it crash. A furtive nature, delighting in petty mysteries, yet wallowing openly in mendacities so gross that a child could detect them, he owes his success in life to his singular power of deceiving men.

He is merely a theorist, a closet-thinker, without any thoughts of his own; always has his ear to the ground listening to those of other people. He never really leads: he follows. He is bigoted, as you might know, for he has the blood of a Scotch parson in him, and as to political principles, he is a hide-bound doctrinaire dating from the eighteenth century. He is asleep with the fathers.

At the same time he is the most dangerous president we have ever had, appointing Socialists to office, founding his whole foreign policy on a Utopian dream, breaking with all the traditions of the country, leading it to the dogs. He has a closed mind and can learn nothing from other people, but in all his speeches and messages you will not find a single notion of his own; anything at all noticeable in them is sure to be taken from some rather radical weekly magazine. The worst thing about Mr. Wilson is his remoteness. Nothing can make any impression on his mind. This quality joined to an extraordinary susceptibility to untried, unsound contemporary suggestions is really the keynote to his personality.

ON the other hand, after a vivid evening spent in the "greatest-since-Lincoln"minded comer, I offer this cheerier compound: The peculiarity .of Mr. Wilson's marvelous mind is its double quality. He has the genius of action; he also has the genius of inaction. His mind will at a given moment act with amazing cogency; at another moment with equal cogency it will not act at all. In each case its course is the one best suited to the exigencies of the hour. When the time comes for arousing and leading a nation, Mr. Wilson's mind will flash like a drawn sabre at the front. When the time comes when the least attempt to awaken the nation would be not only premature but pernicious, Mr. Wilson's mind will pass with consummate political punctuality into repose.

Future historians will recognize the extraordinary insight into public opinion indicated by these fruitful dormancies of mind. It will be said to Mr. Wilson's everlasting fame that during those preliminary intervals of an unripe public opinion when nothing, absolutely nothing, was the right thing to do, Mr. Wilson's intellect grasped the point and did it.

REMARKABLE alike for its activities and for its well-timed non-performances, Mr. Wilson's mind will pass into history as better attuned to the public thought than almost any other presidential intellect. Had he changed an opinion sooner, it would have been too soon; had he changed an opinion later, it would have been too late; had he prepared in advance, he would in the long run have prevented preparation; he was equally a leader when he led and when he stayed behind; and above all he had the art of doing nothing always in the very nick of time. That is the secret of his leadership. The splendid slumbers of the chief executive in the presence of an unawakened public conscience when the least jar would have given that conscience an unseasonable shake will always stand high among the exploits of his intellect in the three years before we went to war. The study of Mr. Wilson's political intelligence as we have seen it for four years past, both in and out of action, brings to light the surprising fact that it leads both in front and behind. It is an intelligence that of its own accord forges to the front of us at the self-same moment that we are dragging it from behind. This is rare in the history of political intelligences. Of no President can it be more truly said: As we have pulled him, so he has led us on.

On the personal side, the almost universal opinion of Mr. Wilson's character is utterly without foundation. In private life he is a warm man.

IN other fields of activity the minds of these speakers are not wholly reckless. Though capable of forming these mental pictures, these speakers will do and say things that demand not only a grasp on reality, but the exercise of a considerable degree of judgment. One man may talk in this way about the character of the President and edit a newspaper every day; another may do so and run a bank successfully. They never go about their daily tasks holding at the same moment two opinions about the newspaper or about the banks, one of which must positively exclude the other. Neither has moments when he believes his newspaper to be a bank or his bank to be a newspaper; neither thinks his institution a combination of both bank and newspaper and of several other incompatible things besides. Nor would anything of that sort come out in his talk. And with the words of these conversations about the character of the President still ringing in their ears, the participants will rise composedly, find their own hats and put them on correctly, cross the street in circumstances that often call for a high degree of discrimination, and achieve long and sometimes complicated journeys home to their wives—probably in every instance to the right one.