It is hard to believe that President Roosevelt has been
thinking seriously of coming to the Economic Conference. The fate of his predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, should be sufficient warning, even though Mr. Roosevelt would no doubt avoid the initial mistakes by which Mr. Wilson so gravely prejudiced his future. But quite apart from Wilson and the Peace Conference, the fact remains that the power in the background is almost always more effective than the power in the arena. If Mr. Wilson had stayed at Washington in 1919 he would still have remained a demi-god and, the world would have bowed to his will. When he got to Paris he was simply a human being and a President reduced to the level of Prime Minister. M. Poineare knew all that well enough, and he succeeded in wrecking the Genoa Conference by staying away from it and laying embargoes by telephone on his delegates. If he had gone in person he might well have found it impossible to persist in an opposition that was easy to maintain a few hundred , miles away.
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