The extraordinary effectiveness lent by this ease and variety of diction to a man who possesses not only words but ideas, is strongly realised in Paris, where an ideal interpreter, M. Paul Mantoux, is always at hand to put whatever the President says into perfect French.  M. Jusserand had given me an enthusiastic account, a few days before this little gathering at the Villa Murat, of an impromptu speech at a luncheon given to the President by the Senate, and in listening to the President’s conversation, I understood what M. Jusserand had felt, and what a weapon at need—­(how rare also among public men!)—­is this skilled excellence in expression, which the President commands, and commands above all, so some of his shrewdest observers tell me, when he is thrown suddenly on his own resources, has no scrap of paper to help him, and must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him.  It is said that the irreverent American Army, made a little restive during the last months of the year by the number of Presidential utterances it was expected to read, and impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling down in the weeks before the Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation to “another literary winter.”  One laughs, but never were the art and practice of literature more signally justified as a power among men than by this former Professor and Head of a college, who is now among the leading political forces of the world.

Well, we talked of many things—­of the future local habitation of the League of Nations, of the Russian impasse, and the prospects of Prinkipo, of Mr. Lloyd George’s speech that day at the Conference, of Siberia and Japan, of Ireland even!  There was no difficulty anywhere; no apparent concealment of views and opinions.  But there was also no carelessness and no indiscretion.  I came away feeling that I had seen a remarkable man, on one of the red-letter days of his life; revolving, too, an old Greek tag which had become familiar to me: 

“Mortal men grow wise by seeing.  But without seeing, how can any man foretell the future—­how he may fare?”

In other words, call no work happy till it is accomplished.  Yes!—­but men and women are no mere idle spectators of a destiny imposed on them, as the Greeks sometimes, but only sometimes, believed.  They themselves make the future.  If Europe wants the League of Nations, and the end of war, each one of us must turn to, and work, each in our own way.  Since the day of the first Conference resolution, the great scheme, like some veiled Alcestis, has come a good deal further down the stage of the world.  There it stands while we debate; as Thanatos and Heracles fought over the veiled queen.  But in truth it rests with us, the audience, and not with any of the leading characters in the drama, to bring that still veiled figure into life and light, and to give it a lasting place in the world’s household.