eatness_

What is the explanation for this tremendous tragedy, which is not
solely American, which closely concerns the whole world? Of course,
there are purely American elements in the explanation which I am not
competent to speak on. But besides the American quarrel with President
Wilson there is something to be said on the great matters in issue. On
these I may be permitted to say a few words.

The position occupied by President Wilson in the world's imagination at
the close of the great war and at the beginning of the peace conference
was terrible in its greatness. It was a terrible position for any mere
man to occupy. Probably to no human being in all history did the hopes,
the prayers, the aspirations of many millions of his fellows turn with
such poignant intensity as to him at the close of the war. At a time of
the deepest darkness and despair, he had raised aloft a light to which
all eyes had turned. He had spoken divine words of healing and
consolation to a broken humanity. His lofty moral idealism seemed for a
moment to dominate the brutal passions which had torn the Old World
asunder. And he was supposed to possess the secret which would remake
the world on fairer lines. The peace which Wilson was bringing to the
world was expected to be God's peace. Prussianism lay crushed; brute
force had failed utterly. The moral character of the universe had been
signally vindicated. There was a universal vague hope in a great moral
peace, of a new world order arising visibly and immediately on the
ruins of the old. This hope was not a mere superficial sentiment. It
was the intense expression at the end of the war of the inner moral and
spiritual force which had upborne the peoples during the dark night of
the war and had nerved them in an effort almost beyond human strength.
Surely, God had been with them in that long night of agony. His was the
victory; His should be the peace. And President Wilson was looked upon
as the man to make this great peace. He had voiced the great ideals of
the new order; his great utterances had become the contractual basis
for the armistice and the peace. The idealism of Wilson would surely
become the reality of the new order of things in the peace treaty.

_Saved the "Little Child"_

In this atmosphere of extravagant, almost frenzied expectation he
arrived at the Paris Peace Conference. Without hesitation he plunged
into that inferno of human passions. He went down into the Pit like a