THE TWO WILSONS

New Zealand Tablet, 5 February 1920, Page 33

THE TWO WILSONS

- ; A recapitulation of the history of President Wilson during the past two years discloses to The Dial evidence of a basic failure of adjustment which was bound to disclose itself eventually in either a mental or a physical reaction. His (says the Fortnightly Review) was the difficulty of the idealist who had not learned to master his materials, and who in the course of prosecuting a vigorous bellicose action ' was able to keep his ideal self only by keeping it apart. As a result two Mr. Wilsons gradually came into existence, and as they developed there arose a dissociation between the world of general staffs, diplomats, and espionage organisations in which Mr. Wilson had to work, and that private world of hope, faith, and infinite charity into which he retired to think. So far from letting the Avar change the disciple of pacifism into the legionVy of Mars, as in Shaw's fable of Ferrovnis in "Androeles and the Lion," Mr. Wilson perfected himself in each of the parts separately, and in each of them created an apparently firm and consistent character. The two Mr. Wilsons went to Paris: one bowing to the crowds, and the other dining with the diplomats. One made speeches against secret diplomacy, the use of arbitrary power, and the disregard of faith and humanity in dealing with those whose sins increased the difficulty of dispensing justice. The other was the "realist" Mr. Wilson who sat in secret conferences, bartered friendly peoples' territories for a- scrap of paper, ignored his pledges both to friend and enemy, and transformed the war to make the world safe for democracy into a peace to make the world profitable for secret treaties. The idealist Mr. Wilson. returned from Paris to campaign with sabbatical seriousness for the League and Treaty that the practical Mr. Wilson had all too astutely assisted in writing. Between these two characters was a sharply drawn conflict. On a less urgent and less important occasion Mr. Wilson might have found some simple defence mechanism, such as the jest or the transferred reproach, to reconcile* those opposites in a higher synthesis. But by the. time his work was challenged in America those defences had been insidiously weakened : and the revelations of Lansing, Bullitt, and Coleord, backed by the criticisms of Knox, Borah, and Johnson, doubtless jolted to the foundations the hitherto self-sufficient complacencies and assurances. The practical Mr. Wilson found it more and more difficult to appeal to the idealist for moral sustenance. And at length the contest between the two personalities could not be concealed: it was a public spectacle. For this reason it had either openly to be proclaimed or transferred to other grounds. An integrated character would have renounced in humiliation the League, the Treaty, and all their works, or it would have blown away the nauseous vapors of justice, humanity, and fair play that enveloped its declarations, and have proclaimed the folly of its hopes and the futility of its promises. Unfortunately the President could not decide whether he was for the old work that had not yet broken up or the new one that was yet to be born. The realist arid the idealist were each too mature and resolute to submit to the domination of the other. The President's lamentable illness is possibly a sign that neither of them will give in, and that the difference is being settled, not by the simple mechanism of rationalisation and compromise, but by the deeper and more ultimate mechanism of disease. It is to be regretted that Mr. Wilson has not had the sanguine flexibility of Mr. Lloyd George; for the English Premier has triumphantly demonstrated how stablo the constitution and mental equipment of a statesman may remain as long as he does not work deliberately against an automatic adjustment by clinging to a cumbersome body of principles and moral convictions. If government is to be effected by majorities the statesman who leads his constituents by following the popular nose is the ideal statesman. The idealist, who can neither master his course of action nor warp his principles, will find that in the art of government all is vanity and vexation of spirit—and that finally the brain lags and the flesh itself is as grass.