For then, what I had backed--all that remained
then--was a thing of shreds and patches. Nobody can think worse of the
Treaty than I do with America out of it, with the Covenant left the
one-sided and precarious thing it now is. Had we only been in it--the rest
wouldn't have mattered. Call it a dung-heap, if you like; yet out of it
would have sprung life. It may still; but _I_ shan't see it, Tumulty;
and that vision, which was then so clear, has become a doubt. Was I
wrong--was I wrong to pretend that I had won anything worth winning? Would
it not have been better to say "I have failed"?
TUMULTY. Forgive me, Governor: you are looking at things from a tired-out
mind. That's not fair, you know.
EX-PRES. But if you knew, oh, if you knew against what odds I fought even
to get that! They knew that they had got me down; and the only card left
me at last was their own reluctance to let a discredited President go back
to his own people and show them his empty hands, and tell them that he had
failed. So a bargain was struck, and this one thing was given me, that
peradventure it might have life--if I, for my part, would come back here
and plead the ratification of the Treaty which they--and I--had made.
Could I have done that with any effect, had I said that in almost
everything I had failed?
TUMULTY. Chief, I think you did right. But I still feel I'm up a back
street. How could things have come to fail as much as they did? After all,
it was a just war.
Pages:
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160