The withering contempt for the pompous vanity of the military conqueror in Byron's 'Ode to Napoleon,' and his admiration of America's clean-handed patriot-ruler are things we should do well also to remember now, when all Europe is paying for the follies of a pettier tyrant who assumed the part of the dead lion and could not roar without betraying himself:
Where may the wearied eye repose,
When gazing on the Great,
Where neither guilty glory glows
Nor despicable state?
Yet one—the first—the last—the best—
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeathed the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one.
Time has taken the sting out of that last line: there has been Lincoln; there is Wilson; to say nothing of others; and it seems likely that in the future Wilson's name will, like Abou Ben Adhem's, 'lead all the rest.'
America went into the world war with such ideals as took us into it, and her
