but a wonderfully efficient body of officers, all things considered, was 

 turned out in an incredibly short time. Needless to say, this could not 

 have been done without the aid of the British and French instructors 

 both in this country and in France. As my Brother was in command at 

 Camp Dix, one of the great training stations, I was able to see something 

 of the system. 



Early in the autumn it became evident that an end of the whole 

 abominable business was fast approaching and the denial of the first 

 announcement of the Armistice could not check the hopeful assurance 

 of victory. In New York, Fifth Avenue was temporarily renamed "the 

 Avenue of the Allies" and was a mass of brilliant colour from the count- 

 less flags of the Allied nations, which hung from nearly every window. 

 From the top of a bus the view up to 59th Street was one of the most 

 extraordinary that I have ever seen. 



When the peace conference met at Paris I think nearly all of Presi- 

 dent Wilson's real friends and well-wishers were grieved and dismayed, 

 both at his unfortunate appeal to the country to return a Democratic 

 Congress and at the make-up of the peace commission. His intense 

 partisanship made it impossible for him to give the Republicans a fair 

 representation, thus inviting the disaster which eventually wrecked his 

 plans. I am convinced that, had the commission contained Mr. Root 

 or Senator Lodge, we should have entered the League of Nations. To 

 say that, as a patriotic American, I have been mortified by the timid, 

 vacillating, oftentimes stupid conduct of our foreign relations by Presi- 

 dent Wilson's successors, is expressing it mildly. It is not pleasant to 

 have our country looked upon as a "quitter," firm only in the collection 

 of debts. 



I saw President Wilson for the last time in April 1921, when I was in 

 Washington for the meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. I 

 called on him, by appointment, at his new house and found him sur- 

 prisingly little changed by his long illness and as keen and brilliant as 

 ever. For nearly three-quarters of an hour, we talked of men and things, 

 saying little of politics or the European situation. He seemed so com- 

 pletely his old self, that I hoped and expected that he had many years 

 of life before him and I did not imagine that my farewell to him was 

 to be the final one. 



The family chronicle of 1917-18 was crowded with events, though the 

 all-absorbing topic of the War somewhat overshadowed them. Our 

 youngest daughter, Angelina, was married to John Giraud Agar, Jr., in 

 May 1917 and our oldest daughter, Adeline, to his brother, Herbert, in 



C 310 3 



