After having lived two years in Italy I found many things about the Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond comprehension. Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such accord. From the day he decided to represent our country in the Peace Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from which could readily be formulated a new hymn of hate. What was the genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust? From whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest, and who attempted to conform his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only statesman who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would make for perpetual peace, be hated and distrusted, vilified and traduced, thwarted and misrepresented by so many of his countrymen? What had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be accorded him? I propose to attempt to answer these questions and thus to suggest why he has been a failure as President. I know the replies usually given to these questions by his depreciators and defamers. "His nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot co-operate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he selects his coadjutors, aides, and advisers from those whom he knows he can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he wage war until months after repeated _casus belli_; he is hypocritical in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan 'He kept us out of war,' and immediately on being elected he 'thrust' the country into war; he was 'too proud to fight' in 1916, but keen to fight in 1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a socialist masquerading as a liberal; he is a Bolshevik beneath the mask of a radical. In brief, he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States; intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people; and withal so completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly human feeling has been crowded from him."