of an emigrant, Woodrow Wilson. Germany was convinced that he was doublefaced-and she said so. 64 The change in later German views, say in the early winter of 1918-1919, was surprizing. When he was on his way to France the German press commented frequently on his journey, and the probable influence he would have on the peace terms. At one time slandered and maligned as hypocritical, he was looked upon now by the German newspapers as a peace apostle and the one person from whom the Germans could expect justice. His "fourteen points" were discust as meaning something for Germany and he was going to Europe in order to insist that his principles there set forth, and as Germany interpreted them, should be carried out. The Lokal Anzeiger, however, remarked that if he wished to put his demands through, he would have to act energetically and with all his personal force at the preliminary conference, "for his ideals had already been thrown in the dust by the armistice conditions and continued to be thrown in the dust at Spa." The Cologne Volkszeitung had learned, from an authoritative source, that "in spite of many difficulties which the Allies had imposed, Wilson intended to insist that Germany should have colonies in Africa." Like many others, that paper tried to prove that, while he would not play a leading rôle in the Peace Conference, he and the other American delegates, if they had an honest desire to do so, "could put through many of his ideas for a just peace." His idea of a league of nations, however, "would be poisoned, if the German nation were treated as an object of exploitation." As for Germany having "guilt for the war on her conscience," the whole German nation, said that paper, "denies the accusation."

Congress during the war bestowed upon President Wilson powers and functions wider than those possest by any ruling monarch— wider even than those Lincoln had. He was empowered to commandeer ships and shipyards, take over industrial establishments and operate them, construct a great merchant marine, send millions of Americans to the trenches in France, provide officers for an aviation service that was to expend $640,000,000, and administer the food-supply of an entire nation. He had to shut himself in and allow many matters which might engage him in times of peace to be handled by assistants.

For the first time in the country's history the exterior of the White House indicated the seclusion in which the President lived. In the daytime a policeman stood guard at every gate. When night came, soldiers with loaded guns and bayonets took places about fifty paces apart on the sidewalks surrounding the grounds. Soldiers had strict orders to make every one move on. There was no loitering about the White House after sundown. The police guard about the President Adapted from an article by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion.

when out riding was doubled. Two motor-cycle policemen clad in khaki joined his automobile the moment it swung out of the grounds and followed within five feet to and from the golf links or wherever else it might go, while in a large automobile twenty to thirty feet to the rear were half a dozen secret-service men. After international affairs began to absorb the President's attention, there was little direct communication with newspaper correspondents. Their former semiweekly conferences with him had to be abandoned after the submarine crisis became acute, because the President could not have answered half the questions that would have been asked, and Tumulty became the source of White House news. Night and day he was asked about

Two Queen mothers on whom President Wilson called while in Europe in 1918

matters of international and domestic moment. Sometimes he was privileged to talk, but at other times he could impart no information.65 · Mr. Wilson included promptness among the highest of minor virtues. He once scolded a delegation from the New Jersey legislature for being two minutes late for an appointment with him when he was Governor. One of his secretaries in Washington declared there never had been in Washington a man who was "so marvelously punctual day in and day out." He was not only punctual himself, but required punctuality from others. When he first went to Washington, senators and members of the House began to follow the old The Sun (New York).

system of taking as much of a President's time as they cared to, but were soon astonished to find that the thing could not be done with Mr. Wilson. Unless the matters on which they called under appointment were of unusual importance, each conference was expected to last not more than three to five minutes. At the end of the allotted time the President would rise to his feet and say: "Now you may be sure that this will be looked into." After each caller departed the President-who was so expert a stenographer that a page from his note-book was as clean-cut as a piece of engraving-made a shorthand note of the call and the business. At the end of each day he went through the note-book, gave directions or dictated letters, and thus ended the work for that day.

Breakfast was strictly a fixt feast at the White House, beginning at eight o'clock promptly. He did not scorn the saving of minutes and so was never five minutes late to breakfast. At 8.55-not "about nine" or "when I finish breakfast," but at 8.55 his personal secretary was expected to be ready to take down answers to important letters received the day before. At ten he was at his desk in his private office and for half an hour such routine as could be was disposed of. Then came the appointments, each cut down to a minimum. After luncheon he was ready to meet tourists-this was the case before the war-or to hold a conference with some member of the Cabinet, or with a foreign diplomat. After that came his recreation. Dinner was at seven, "and so to bed"-invariably between ten and midnight. He had on his desk four accurately arranged piles of documents and could say to a secretary: "Go over to my study desk. The paper we want you will find in the pile nearest my seat on the right-hand end. It is the fifth from the top." Always when he went after it, the secretary would find the paper exactly where the President said it was. He did things for himself, such as filing important papers with his own hands in a filing-case back of his chair. When he had finished using a pen, he would take a piece of chamois-skin from a drawer, wipe his pen clean and return the chamois-skin and pen to their places. He was so exact that he could tell whether anybody had moved anything on his desk during his absence.66

In his troubled days at Princeton, when he was President, one charge against him was that he so shut himself up in his home-life that he did not know men and the ways of men. In this charge there was truth, to the extent that Mr. Wilson's own fireside was always dearer to him than the thronged marts of casual contacts. He never felt so completely himself as when he had gathered with wife and daughters and a few chosen friends around the fireside, and allowed his spirit to move whither it listeth. He was no superman, but 66 James Hay, Jr., in The American Magazine.

human to the core. One of his most obvious qualities in his home life was an incorrigible playfulness. Graver people sometimes thought he was too much that way, for he would joke in the midst of serious discussions. His fund of anecdote, his gleeful delight in nonsense rimes, his atrocities in punmaking (an inheritance from his father, from whom he derived many traits), all these things were pronounced in him, together with character-humor, the knack of giving word-portrayals of people in incongruous settings. Altho the tenderest of men, he was the least sentimental. When the war began the foundations of his own life were crumbling under him. It was just as the war opened that his first wife died. "I can not help thinking," he said, "that perhaps she was taken so that she might be spared the spectacle of this awful calamity." His relatives knew after her death that he was the loneliest man in the world. One of them wrote afterward of "the lonely figure walking down the long hallway at the White House, his hair much whitened in a few months." 67

ALFRED ZIMMERMANN, GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTER

Not because he was a great figure during the World War does Zimmermann have a place among these sketches, but because he, more than any other, in a brief term of office, dealt the last stroke that was needed to consolidate American sentiment in favor of declaring war on Germany. When the sinking of the Lusitania and its civilian passengers aroused widespread sentiment for war among American people in the East, the Middle and Far West were indifferent. If rich Easterners chose to sail on British ships, it was their risk, said many in the West, and not the risk of all the American people. But when Zimmermann's note proposing to Mexico the invasion of the Southwest, with a view to conquering American States formerly Mexican territory, and asking Mexico to secure aid from Japan, the cost to be paid by Germany, people beyond the Allegheny and the Mississippi began really to see red.

No photograph had ever done justice to the strong, scarred face of Alfred Zimmermann, because, as the Paris Figaro said, the countenance of the Chief of the Foreign Office in Berlin, after Jagow left it, had an expressiveness too baffling for the camera. The blue eyes, the somewhat carroty hue of hair and mustache, the pallor of face, the traces of sword-slashes on his cheek, left over from university days, gave no more clue to the soul of the man within than did photographs in Berlin shop-windows. In an almost literal sense of the phrase, Zimmermann talked with his face. His features reflected every conceivable change. With ease he could look 67 Stockton Axson in The Public Ledger (Philadelphia).

gay, yet in another second his eyes could flash an exquisite anger and the lines upon his brow could show an embarrassing accentuation, but a smile would arrive at the climax of his fury. His laugh was a masterpiece-ringing, clear, hearty, and revealing well-kept teeth, notwithstanding his fifty-seven years, and conveying an impression of spontaneity, of true mirth. His real vocation would have been histrionic cinematography. There was no artist in the "movies" whose countenance lent itself to the purposes of the film with a versatility so irresistible. Ordinary photographs in illustrated papers robbed him of his due, for his soul was that of a chameleon. The lack of the particle "von" should not have led one to an inference that Zimmermann was not well born. On his mother's side he had relatives among the nobility of Bavaria, and the hereditary wealth of the family went back five generations. So far was he from being self-made that he went to the University at Breslau and to Berlin for the prosecution of severe studies in history, economics, law and literature. But to the diplomatic service he was a rank outsider. He had climbed the ladder of promotion by way of the consular service, having been a commercial expert. He was alien to the exquisite school of Jagow, his knowledge being not primarily of waltzing, or of dining, or of that human nature to which the Machiavellis and Metternichs had appealed. Zimmermann knew all about the importation of hides from Argentina, and could make a happy guess of the number of tons of tea there were in warehouses in Moscow. This afforded a hint of the avenue along which he had traveled, said the Rome Tribuna, a correspondent of which, like many other journalists, knew him well. He was an economist rather than a business man, one of the creators of practical economics in the new and German sense of that term. To him more than to any other living individual was the Berlin exporter indebted for the "science" behind his invasion of world markets. Zimmermann's exhaustive and learned works on the relations between commerce and diplomacy were German classics. Yet he was neither a pedant, a cosmopolite, a mere business man, nor a bureaucrat.

Ever since his first connection with the Foreign Department, of which he was for a time head, he had studied the characteristies of people among whom he was thrown-Chinese, Russians, Finns, Bulgars. Long scrutiny of human nature accounted for the ease with which he got acquainted with others. He was not long a stranger to any one, and no one remained long a stranger to him. He could meet no living human being without discovering mutual acquaintances. He had a positive genius for the discovery, at a first encounter, of intimate themes which gave to the talk a personal touch of the friendliest kind. He would go out of his way to be amiable to young