e a place. But it may be accurately said of
them, nevertheless, that if actual honour is not in them, then at least
they have something of the manner of honour--that they are moving in the
direction of honour, though not yet arrived. Few men, indeed, may be
said to belong certainly and irrevocably in either category, that of the
men of honour or that of the men of morals. Dr. Wilson, perhaps, is one
such man. He is as palpably and exclusively a man of morals as, say,
George Washington was a man of honour. He is, in the one category, a
great beacon, burning almost blindingly; he is, in the other, no more
than a tallow dip, guttering asthmatically. But the majority of men
occupy a sort of twilight zone, and the most that may be said of them is
that their faces turn this way or that. Such is the case with Dr.
Wilson's chief foes. Their eyes are upon honour, as upon some new and
superlatively sweet enchantment, and, bemused to starboard, they view
the scene to port with somewhat extravagant biliousness. Thus, when they
contemplate His Excellency's long and perhaps unmatchable series of
violations of his troth--in the matter of "keeping us out of the war,"
in the matter of his solemn promises to China, in the matter of his
statement of war aims and purposes, in the matter of his shifty dealing
with the Russian question, in the matter of his repudiation of the
armistice terms offered to the Germans, in the matter of his stupendous
lying to the Senate committee on foreign relations, and so on, _ad
infinitum_--when they contemplate all that series of evasions, dodgings,
hypocrisies, double-dealings and plain mendacities, they succumb to an
indignation that is still more than half moral, and denounce him
bitterly as a Pecksniff, a Tartuffe and a Pinto. In that judgment, as we
shall show, there is naught save a stupid incapacity to understand an
unlike man--in brief, no more than the dunderheadedness which makes a
German regard every Englishman as a snuffling poltroon, hiding behind
his vassals, and causes an Englishman to look upon every German as a
fiend in human form, up to his hips in blood.

But one expects a man's foes to misjudge him, and even to libel him
deliberately; a good deal of their enmity, in fact, is often no more
than a product of their uneasy consciousness that they have dealt
unfairly with him; one is always most bitter, not toward the author of
one's wrongs, but toward the victim of one's wrongs. Unluckily, Dr