help him, and must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him. It is said
that the irreverent American Army, made a little restive during the
last months of the year by the number of Presidential utterances it
was expected to read, and impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling
down in the weeks before the Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation
to "another literary winter." One laughs, but never were the art and
practice of literature more signally justified as a power among men
than by this former Professor and Head of a college, who is now among
the leading political forces of the world.

Well, we talked of many things--of the future local habitation of the
League of Nations, of the Russian _impasse_, and the prospects of
Prinkipo, of Mr. Lloyd George's speech that day at the Conference, of
Siberia and Japan, of Ireland even! There was no difficulty anywhere;
no apparent concealment of views and opinions. But there was also no
carelessness and no indiscretion. I came away feeling that I had seen
a remarkable man, on one of the red-letter days of his life;
revolving, too, an old Greek tag which had become familiar to me:

"Mortal men grow wise by seeing. But without seeing, how can any man
foretell the future--how he may fare?"

In other words, call no work happy till it is accomplished. Yes!--but
men and women are no mere idle spectators of a destiny imposed on
them, as the Greeks sometimes, but only sometimes, believed. They
themselves _make_ the future. If Europe wants the League of Nations,
and the end of war, each one of us must turn to, _and work_, each in
our own way. Since the day of the first Conference resolution, the
great scheme, like some veiled Alcestis, has come a good deal further
down the stage of the world. There it stands while we debate; as