Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the political leader of his own country--he had lost the Congressional elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up in the George Washington to take him home; but in the end he was outguessed--in the smart word, he was outsmarted. He had imagined that he could defeat the old Europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues. He had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. And Clemenceau and Lloyd George kept him quarreling over a mile of boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred passions; they starved German children by an embargo; they rumored reparations; they promised to hang the Kaiser; they drew Wilson deeper into smaller conferences; they promised him a League about which their cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations and the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the old European system triumphant. They had fretted him and tried him and they had made their own people forget the passionate faith Wilson had inspired; they made Wilson the agent of disillusion for all that was generous and hopeful in Europe. They could do it because the moment Wilson began to talk to the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. From the moment he allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut himself off from all Germany; he did not know the temper of the working class in Europe, and he refused to listen to the men he himself had sent to report on Russia, which did not help him with the radical trade unions in France or the liberals in England. One by one the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the Italians sullenly nursing a grievance, the French whipping up a drama of revenge and memory in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the British "isolating" themselves in virtual control of the Continent, everybody frightened of Russia--and everyone still listening for another word of honest truth from Wilson, who was silent; for America was starting on a long era of isolation from Europe (the first in a century), an aberration in American life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only with its vulgar oratory. _The Excommunication of Europe_