House and argued for a less partisan appeal. All they accomplished
was the striking of Mr. Lodge's name out of the appeal by
convincing Mr. Wilson that he could not attack the Republican
Senator while ignoring the worse offenses of Mr. Kitchen and Champ
Clark in his own party.

For the rest, the President made the appeal more purely personal
and more partisan than before. He could not get the Lodge obsession
out of his mind. He could not bring himself to ask for the election
of members of Mr. Lodge's party. The wisdom of Mr. Cummings and Mr.
McCormick was soon vindicated. The appeal with Mr. Lodge's name out
was only a shade less impolitic than it would have been with his
name in. It gave Mr. Lodge his majority in the Senate and turned
the peace into a personal issue between the two "scholars in
politics."

By this time Mr. Wilson had lost his sense of actuality. He could
ask the nation for a Congress to his liking as a personal due. He
could condemn Mr. Lodge as an enemy of those purposes with which we
entered the war, simply because Mr. Lodge could hurt him as no
other man could. The President had been talking for some months to
the whole world and the whole world had listened with profound
attention. His mission had taken, unconsciously perhaps, a
Messianic character. His enemies were the enemies of God. The
ordinary metes and bounds of personality had broken down. The state
of mind revealed in the appeal as originally written was the state
of mind of the Peace Conference and of the fight over the Treaty
and the League which succeeded the Peace Conference. All that
happened afterwards, including the pitiful personal tragedy, had
become inevitable.