For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself.
Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,--their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World.
But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations!
It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived.
It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself.