Old World's heart of stone might blunt the sharpest blade of the bravest
knight-errant. But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern
where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary.

But if the President was not the philosopher-king, what was he? After
all he was a man who had spent much of his life at a University. He was
by no means a business man or an ordinary party politician, but a man of
force, personality, and importance. What, then, was his temperament?

The clue once found was illuminating. The President was like a
Nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian. His thought and his
temperament wore essentially theological not intellectual, with all the
strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and
expression. It is a type of which there are not now in England and
Scotland such magnificent specimens as formerly; but this description,
nevertheless, will give the ordinary Englishman the distinctest
impression of the President.

With this picture of him in mind, we can return to the actual course of
events. The President's program for the World, as set forth in his
speeches and his Notes, had displayed a spirit and a purpose so
admirable that the last desire of his sympathizers was to criticize
details,--the details, they felt, were quite rightly not filled in at
present, but would be in due course. It was commonly believed at the
commencement of the Paris Conference that the President had thought out,
with the aid of a large body of advisers, a comprehensive scheme not
only for the League of Nations, but for the embodiment of the Fourteen
Points in an actual Treaty of Peace. But in fact the President had
thought out nothing; when it came to practice his ideas were nebulous
and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas