Woodrow Wilson.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 17989, 5 February 1924, Page 8

Woodrow Wilson.

The death of ex-President Wilson, which we announce to-day, removes one who has been, for four years, one of the most tragip wrecks of the Great Wnr. Mr Wilson was for a time the moral leader of the world. No one else in any coxtntry approached him in power, or had anything like his prestige, both as President of the greatest Republic in the world and as acknowledged leader of tbe leaders who were going to make the world safe for democracy. But in a month or two his own people had spurned him, and the world at largo had begun fto speak of him as a dupe, if not something worse, a man both deceived and deceiving, who was wholly unfit to direct the destinies of his own or any nation. There seems some exaggeration now in the opinion of General Smuts that " probably to no human being in all "history did the hopes, the prayers, "the aspirations of so many millions "of his fellows turn with such "poignant intensity as to him at " the closo of the war." If the single word "human" is omitted here the comparison is seen in a somewhat astonishing light. Yet there can be no donbt that Mr Wilson stood high above all his contemporaries for a brief period preceding and following the Armistice, and tho tragedy that followed has few parallels in political calamity. It is certain, however, that the tido had turned even before his

death, and that posterity tst.ll see in him the very real elements of greatness which partisan bitterness has more of less successfully obscured since the beginning of 1921. There was never any justification for the belief that he found himself in Enropo an "innocent " abroad," and that he ended ag the innocent always do end when they_ fall among thieves. The unsophisticated professor theory will not stand. In political experience of a certain kind Mr "Wilson was undoubtedly a little lacking: he was never the equal of M. Clemenceau in that kind of diplomacy which is neither more nor less than beating someone else in the scramble for, place and power, nor did he approach our own astute Mr Lloyd George in watching two fronts at once. But he , was as far removed as a shrewd, capable, and deeply cultivated man can be from mere simplicity, and one of the discoveries of the future will be how big a part he played before hostilities ceased in weakening Germany's moral resistance. We have mentioned this matter before, but it is a little surprising that while everybody associates the ex-President with the League of Nations, and remembers something of his Fourteen Points, few remember that it was his refusal to discuss peace with the German rulers of the day, with his'declared readiness to discuss it with true representatives of the German people, that broke the German home-front. In some other respects, of course, the ex-President failed. He remained an idealist when the situation had begun to be dominated by brutal realists, and although we can see now that he modified that realism, he most seriously miscalculated the response of his own and all other people to the appeal of right alone. In smaller matters also—a certain aloofness from colleagues, a solemn, and clearly too solemn, belief in his own mission, the combination resulting in a reluctance to take advice—he was temperamentally his own enemy. But if we use our words with these necessary qualifications in mind—with the qualification especially that he was an idealist who set out to achieve a real task and failed —we are safe to say with General Smuts that the author of the League of Nations has not permanently failed, and that Americans of the future may yet rani*: him with Washington and Lincoln.