President Wilson failed to carry through the policy he had proclaimed, as greater men have failed in similar moral circumstances. The failure need not have been disastrous to the cause which he had espoused. It might have marked merely a step towards ultimate success, if he had admitted the failure. Had he said in effect: 'Reaction has won this battle; we have been guilty of errors and shortcomings, but we shall maintain the fight, and avoid such errors in future,' he would have created for the generation which followed a clear-cut issue. Whatever there was of courage and sincerity of purpose in the idealism he had created earlier in the War, would have rallied to his support. Just because such a declaration would have created an issue dividing men sharply and even bitterly, it would have united each side strongly; men would have had the two paths clearly and distinctly before their eyes, and though forced for the time along that of reaction, they would have known the direction in which they were travelling. Again and again victory has come out of defeat; again and again defeat has nerved men to greater effort. But when defeat is represented as victory by the trusted leader, there follows the subtlest and most paralysing form of confusion and doubt. Men no longer know who are the friends and who the enemies of the things they care for. When callous cruelty is called righteous, and cynical deception justice, men begin to lose their capacity to distinguish the one from the other, and to change sides without consciousness of their treason. In the field of social relationship, the better management by men of their society, a sincere facing of the simple truths of life, right conclusions from facts that are of universal knowledge, are of immeasurably greater importance than erudition. Indeed we see that again and again learning obscures in this field the simpler truths. The Germany that had grown up before the War is a case in point. Vast learning, meticulous care over infinite detail, had become the mark of German scholarship. But all the learning of the professors did not prevent a gross misreading of what, to the rest of the world, seemed all but self-evident--simple truths which perhaps would have been clearer if the learning had been less, used as it was to buttress the lusts of domination and power.