From ‘President Wilson’s Mistake’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915:
President Wilson’s attitude can only be described as a tragedy. We do not believe that there was a man more determined than he was when he entered office to conduct his administration on moral lines, and to show the world that morality and politics are not incompatible, and that cynicism need not really be the rule for statesmen. Alas for the President that he did not follow his own natural instinct for the right instead of his reason. It would never have betrayed him. Instead, it would have led him on the road which he really wants to travel. It would not in the least have risked involving him or his country in war, and he would have gone down to history as the man who kept his country at peace while at the same time he had the courage to speak out in the name of the Republic on the side of right and justice. The turning-point was his answer to the deputation of Belgian notables who went to the United States at the very beginning of the war. President Wilson received them with his finger on his lip lest Germany should be offended. If he had spoken what was in his heart, though it would have offended Germany, there would have been no war between her and the United States. The Germans were not going to send an ultimatum to America because the President had said that good and evil were different things, and that no policy of neutrality could ignore that essential fact.
President Wilson will go down to history as a man on whom fate has been specially hard. But for this war the world would probably have regarded him as one of America’s greatest and most high-minded statesmen. As it is, the verdict of the world will be like that of Tacitus on the Roman Emperor. Every one would have deemed President Wilson capable of nobly filling his high office had not he been triad in the fire of a great crisis. Political luck never struck a man harder than it has struck him.
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