PRESIDENT Wilson lends himself to caricature and the art of the cartoonist almost as readily as does the Kaiser himself. We fancy that the war will be over ere the average British mind grasps either the magnitude of the task of the President of the United States or the underlying principles which have actuated him throughout.

It has been the custom with many people (and this has been as marked in the United States as in Great Britain) to condemn the President for “kid glove” diplomacy, weakness, and indecision. And upon the surface one is bound to admit that there appear to be grounds for both criticism and disappointment. One would need to have the archives of the Foreign Office at one’s disposal to form a just and perfectly informed judgment concerning President Wilson’s “line of least resistance.”

Perhaps an American has put the matter as succinctly as anyone. “It needs a really strong man,” he said, “to keep one’s fingers out of a pie like the European War. A free people do not see another free people, and a weak nation at that, trampled, murdered, and destroyed, at least for the time being, by the greatest fighting machine in Europe without wanting to cut in. But I guess the best day’s work America and Wilson have done for the Allies has been to keep out of it. Some day you’ll see that we were cutting ice for you all the time.”

Time will perhaps make clear what some of us only suspect.

Whatever shortcomings President Wilson may appear to us to have as an active champion of right and civilization against hideous wrong and barbarism, he is a past-master in the art of the diplomatic shower-bath, as the Kaiser and his unscrupulous minions in the United States have discovered more than once. Every attempt to lead him into hostile acts toward the Allies, every skilful diplomatic ruse which was engendered with the object of involving America in hostilities, has been quietly but effectively countered by the President. He appears to have had the chain of the shower-bath ever in his hand. And the verbal “douches” administered, though couched in the unemotional phraseology of diplomacy, have always been effective. The officials of the Wilhelmstrasse must have abandoned hope long ago. And, in the words of an American friend, “they must turn up their collars and get out umbrellas and prepare for some rain when a diplomatic note arrives from Wilson.”

CLIVE HOLLAND.