“The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, has its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality. Politics gives the name of ‘issues’ to its fads. A taking issue is as a stunning gown, or ‘a best seller.’ The President’s mind wears a coat of many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz Brown as ‘a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.’ I wonder if that can be justly said of the President? ‘Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pianiste,’ adjured the superscription over the music stand in the Dakota dive; ‘she is doing the best that she knows how.’ “Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that one of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and let loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one! “In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and British Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off the grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed two wars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preëmpted. “Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries to the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which he grew up. “I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, not theories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady in the play, that the President ‘doth protest too much,’ which displeases me and where, in point of fact, I ‘get off the reservation.’