50 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch. Ill

psychology, to suggest to the President that theTreaty was an abandonment of his professions wasto touch on the raw a Freudian complex. It was asubject intolerable to discuss, and every subconsciousinstinct plotted to defeat its further exploration.

Thus it was that Clemenceau brought to success,what had seemed to be, a few months before, the extra-ordinary and impossible proposal that the Germans should not be heard. If only the President had notbeen so conscientious, if only he had not concealedfrom himself what he had been doing, even at thelast moment he was in a position to have recoveredlost ground and to have achieved some very con-siderable successes. But the President was set. Hisarms and legs had been spliced by the surgeons to acertain posture, and they must be broken again beforethey could be altered. To his horror, Mr. LloydGeorge , desiring at the last moment all the modera-tion he dared, discovered that he could not in fivedays persuade the President of error in what it hadtaken five months to prove to him to be just andright. After all, it was harder to de-bamboozle thisold Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him ;for the former involved his belief in and respectfor himself.

Thus in the last act the President stood forstubbornness and a refusal of conciliations.