The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1920-03-27
THE OF
OUR UNITED STATES

dark ABOUT tnelr cnleI executive Oh
ficer. The atmosphere of the White
House has borne a strange Likeness.
to that of the inner court circle o.
a bygone Petrograd. At the end Of
a period of months containing crit.
cal days the disability of the Presi-
dent, his own spokesman declare, has
gone. He himself has returned tc
activity from that mysterious realm
of illness, and the considerations
which stayed comment that might
have vexed him then are dissipated al
the time of this writing. May he be
spared from further suffering!
To everyone it has been plain that
the expression emanating from the
White House during this dark period
were not of the time and tune of the
man we knew. To those who are
close to inner circle in Washington
there appeared a picture, strange in
deed in this Republic-the picture OF
a small group attempting to supply
us with a fictitious president. Their
activities have been overshadowed by
the fact of the Presidents own per-
sonality stepping ono more out OF
the semidarkness.
He energies. Within seventy-two
hours the country sees him dismiss
his secretary of state and learns that
he has delivered an ultimatum to the
Allies upon a subject to which the
American people are still strangers
and their judgment as to our own
Hardy, indeed, must be the faith that
is not now shaken by the doubts and
fears raised by a review of the Presi-
dents later career.
Whether one has agreed with the
President or has looked upon his
effect on the world as disturbing and
as ad~ulterating the sense of practical
obligations to mankind by preaching
the rights of mankind, it is no longer
possible to maintain that his later
course has not been marked by fail
ures. These failures are so apparent
that they are shafts of stone to guide
the future historian. The judgment of
the world has condemned his belated
realization of the moral issues of the
war, his attempts in the early months
Of 1917 to act as negotiator of a
peace proposed by Germany, his fail
ure to insist that our full force be
thrown into the field until the panic
of the German advance in 1918, his
partisan appeal for political ends for
he was rebuked in the con-
g~ressional elections of that year, his
unpreparedness, in temperament and
knowledge of facts, to translate his
noble purposes of idealism into eff
fective dealing with those who got
the best of him at Paris, his compro-
misses at the peace table even on
questions of international honor, and
his loss of faith and affection that
European people had laid at his feet.
his attempt upon his return to hold
his last redoubt-a league of nations
in the precise form of his dictation-
and the disclosure that in this exact
ing position the people were not be-
hind him. And now at last his OWL
party has awakened to the realiza.
ton that under his leadership the
oldest and soundest principles O.
democracy have been submerged ant
that a dictatorship instinct has ever
reached out for government owner
ship of public opinion.
1t is not reassuring, therefore, tt
find the President of the United State
returning to activity askias his secre
tary of state rs it true that" tn
latter held cabinet meetings during
these months of executive disabilit,
during which the American peopl
have been as much in the dark a
they were about the peace treaty. 0
course, the President knows it i:
true. He wedges in a flimsy accuse
ton under the unfortunate Lansing
whose conscience had vacillated a
Paris between loyalty to an obliga
ton of silence and a sense of dut
to tell his countrymen what he kneN
of the skeletons under the peac
table. Turning from Lansing, tn
President embroils himself once NOR
in the Adriatic controversy which ha
ragged between Italy and the Jugo
slavs. He may have a right to oh
ject to the effort of the allied power
to make the United States a guaran
tor of a settlement with which it doe
not agree, but his ENHANCEMENT
the unpleasant situation is of hi
own making. The chances are that
referendum to the American peopl
would not result in the approval Q