Properly to analyze Europe’s mentality in respect of the United States’ entry into the war we need to bear in mind that for the thirty-two preceding months President Wilson was the riddle of the political universe. Europe had been assured ceaselessly since August, 1914, that America was overwhelmingly and irretrievably pro-Ally, though its confidence in such assertions was shipwrecked when we failed to go to war over the _Lusitania_ incident and was never fully restored. Not even Berlin could reconcile the Washington government’s invincible neutrality with the alleged existence of universal counter-sentiment. Europeans are educated to believe that public opinion is the only monarch to whom the American citizenry owns allegiance. They were unable to comprehend a president who so resolutely refused to bow to the people’s sovereign will. In its myopic misconception of American conditions, Allied Europe indulged in grotesque misinterpretation of Mr. Wilson’s hesitancy and mystic diplomacy. He had been "re-elected by German votes." In London Americans were solemnly asked if the true explanation of his policy did not lie in the fact that he had "a German wife!" It was also mooted that he had "a secret understanding" with Count Bernstorff. The president was this, that and the other thing--everything, in fact, except what he ought to be. No American chief magistrate since Lincoln was ever so magnificently misunderstood, none so incorrigibly maligned. Thus it was that although the United States’ action under President Wilson’s sagacious leadership did not fill Europe with either animation or excitement, it nevertheless came as a full-fledged surprise to both sets of belligerents. Briton, Frenchman, Russian and Italian, as well as German, Austrian and Hungarian, each in his own dogmatic way, had long since and definitely made up their minds that America did not mean to fight. Their cocksureness on this cardinal point was not unnaturally supported by the circumstances of President Wilson’s re-election on what was commonly understood to be the democratic candidate’s paramount campaign issue--his success in keeping the country out of the war. In the two or three days in which Mr. Wilson’s fate trembled in the balance of the Electoral College, a London newspaper, venting splenitic feelings long pent up, gratefully acclaimed the premature announcement of Mr. Hughes’ triumph as an historic and deserved rebuke of the statesman who was "too proud to fight."