with which
Clemenceau treated the other French delegates.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Lamont says of the President at Paris: "I never saw a
man more ready and anxious to consult than he.... President Wilson did
not have a well-organized secretarial staff. He did far too much of the
work himself, studying until late at night papers and documents that he
should have largely delegated to some discreet aides. He was by all odds,
the hardest worked man at the Conference; but the failure to delegate
more of his work was not due to any inherent distrust that he had of
men--and certainly not to any desire to 'run the whole show' himself--but
simply to the lack of facility in knowing how to delegate work on a large
scale. In execution we all have a blind spot in some part of our eye.
President Wilson's was in his inability to use men; an inability, mind
you, not a refusal. On the contrary, when any of us volunteered or
insisted upon taking responsibility off his shoulders he was delighted."]

General conviction of Wilson's autocratic nature has been intensified by
his choice of assistants, who have not as a rule enjoyed public
confidence. He debarred himself from success in the matter of
appointments, in the first place, by limiting his range of choice through
unwillingness to have about him those who did not share his point of
view. It is more epigrammatic than exact to say that he was the sole unit
in the Government giving value to a row of ciphers, for his Cabinet, as
a whole, was not composed of weak men. But the fact that the members of
his Cabinet accepted implicitly his firm creed that the Cabinet ought to
be an executive and not a political council, that it depended upon the
President's policy, and that its main function should be merely to carry
that policy into effect, gave to the public some justification for its
belief that Wilson's was a "one-man" Government. This belief was further
intensified by the President's extreme sensitiveness to hostile
criticism, which more than anything else hindered frank interchange of
opinion between himself and strong personalities. On more than one
occasion he seemed to regard opposition as tantamount to personal
hostility, an attitude which at times was not entirely unjustified. In
the matter of minor appointments Wilson failed generally of success
because he consistently refused to take a personal interest, leaving them
to subordinates and admitting that political necessities must go far to