instinct of his stubborn nature rose in self-protection. In the language
of medical psychology, to suggest to the President that the Treaty was
an abandonment of his professions was to touch on the raw a Freudian
complex. It was a subject intolerable to discuss, and every subconscious
instinct plotted to defeat its further exploration.

Thus it was that Clemenceau brought to success, what had seemed to be, a
few months before, the extraordinary and impossible proposal that the
Germans should not be heard. If only the President had not been so
conscientious, if only he had not concealed from himself what he had
been doing, even at the last moment he was in, a position to have
recovered lost ground and to have achieved some very considerable
successes. But the President was set. His arms and legs had been spliced
by the surgeons to a certain posture, and they must be broken again
before they could be altered. To his horror, Mr. Lloyd George, desiring
at the last moment all the moderation he dared, discovered that he could
not in five days persuade the President of error in what it had taken
five months to prove to him to be just and right. After all, it was
harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to
bamboozle him; for the former involved his belief in and respect for
himself.

Thus in the last act the President stood for stubbornness and a refusal
of conciliations.


FOOTNOTES:

[6] He alone amongst the Four could speak and understand both
languages, Orlando knowing only French and the Prime Minister and