DEAD MEN'S TALES

The current tendency in the criticism of contemporary and historical characters is to give them credit for their good traits as well as to censure them for their evil ones. Rowing hard against this modern critical stream, however, comes "The Senate and the League of Nations," written by the late Henry Cabot Lodge. Instead of discussing the Senate and the League of Nations from various angles and then building up proof to support the conclusions of the author, as one might expect in this enlightened age, the book devotes very little space to specific issues, and abounds in vituperative generalities directed against the late President Wilson. That Mr. Wilson's cosmos was all ego, that "the key to all he did was that he thought of everything in terms of Wilson," is Mr. Lodge's principal assertion. This is supplemented by averments to the effect that the former president had great personal ambitions without the nerve or daring to fight for them; that he was neither well-educated nor well-read; that he was so impudent as to invent phrases of his own when he could just as well have quoted from the classics; and that he was forced to resign from the presidency of Princeton.

After reading this book, one wonders if William Allen White was not mistaken in his hero, if Woodrow Wilson's character and life were entirely devoid of anything good and true.

It is easy to understand why Henry Cabot Lodge disagreed so violently with Mr. Wilson. That two men of such opposite temperaments and points of view should differ was only natural. But one did not expect from the pen of a man so well-educated and of such estimable social position as was the late senator the sustained innuendos and invectives that appear in this posthumous work. Instead of correcting the world's opinion of Woodrow Wilson's character, as he thought he was doing, Mr. Lodge has left a monument that will serve to lessen the world's appreciation of himself.