H. G. Wells On President Wilson: 1919

H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World

(London; William Heinemann Ltd, rep. June 1933), 344.

‘Says Dr. [E.J.] Dillon in his book, The Peace Conference, “Europe, when the President [Wilson] touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter.

Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would take them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and blockades unknown.

And to their thinking he was that great leader.

In France men bowed down before him with awe and affection.

Labor leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and water to help him to realize his noble schemes. To the working classes in Italy his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would be renewed.

The Germans regarded him and his humane doctrine as their sheet-anchor of safety.” Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson raised. How completely he disappointed them and how weak and futile was the League of Nations he made is too long and too distressful a story to tell here.

He exaggerated in his person our common human tragedy, he was so very great in his dreams and so incapable in his performance. America dissented from the acts of its President and would not join the league Europe accepted from him. There was a slow realization on the part of the American people that it had been rushed into something for which it was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding realization on the part of Europe that America had nothing ready to give the old world in its extremity.’

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