.
Wilson's friends have had at him even more cruelly. When, seeking to
defend what they regard as his honour, they account for his incessant
violation of his pledges--to the voters in 1916, to the soldiers drafted
for the war, to the Chinese on their entrance, to the Austrians when he
sought to get them out, to the Germans when he offered them his
fourteen points, to the country in the matter of secret diplomacy--when
his friends attempt to explain his cavalier repudiation of all these
pledges on the ground that he could not have kept them without violating
later pledges, they achieve, of course, only an imbecility, obvious and
damning, for it must be plain that no man is permitted, in honour, to
make antagonistic engagements, or to urge his private tranquillity or
even the public welfare as an excuse for changing their terms without
the consent of the parties of the second part. A man of honour is one
who simply does whatever he says he will do, provided the other party
holds to the compact too. One cannot imagine him shifting, trimming and
making excuses; it is his peculiar mark that he never makes
excuses--that the need of making them would fill him with unbearable
humiliation. The moment a man of honour faces the question of his
honour, he is done for; it can no more stand investigation than the
chastity of a woman can stand investigation. In such a character, Dr.
Wilson would have been bound irrevocably by all his long series of
solemn engagements, from the first to the last, without the slightest
possibility of dotting an "i" or of cutting off the tail of a comma. It
would have been as impossible for him to have repudiated a single one
of them at the desire of his friends or in the interest of his
idealistic enterprises as it would have been for him to have repudiated
it to his own private profit.

But here is where both foes and friends go aground; both attempt to
inject concepts of honour into transactions predominatingly, and perhaps
exclusively, coloured by concepts of morals. The two things are quite
distinct, as the two sorts of men are quite distinct. Beside the
obligation of honour there is the obligation of morals, entirely
independent and often directly antagonistic. And beside the man who
yields to the punctilio--the man of honour, the man who keeps his
word--there is the man who submits himself, regardless of his personal
engagements and the penalties that go therewith, to the clarion call of
the mora