same course, as President of a State, and equally full of hope that my work would prosper. In America, and afterwards in England and everywhere, numbers of people asked me what it felt like to be President since I had secured independence for our people. They took it for granted that I was the happiest man on earth. In Prague a well-known German writer visited me so that, as he said, he might see with his own eyes a really happy man. Happy?
As President I thought only of going on with the task in hand, and of the responsibility which all of us who were capable of thinking politically would have to bear. I felt neither happy nor happier than before, though knowledge of the inner consistency, of the internal logic of my long life’s work gladdened me. From a review of my own life and of what I had done abroad, I went on to review the world war, the political evolution of Europe since 1848, that is to say during my lifetime, and sought to trace amid a multitude of details the scarlet thread of cause and effect.
“So we are free, shall be free. We have an independent Republic! A fairy-tale,” I said to myself, again and again, now unconsciously, now consciously and aloud, “that we are really f-r-e-e and have our own Re-pub-lic!”
Yet, in my mind, stillness reigned. Day after day I paced the deck, gazing across the waves; though the sense of new duties, new tasks, knocked ceaselessly at the door of my brain; anxieties about the peace negotiations and their outcome, care upon care. One thing was clear-despite science and philosophy, reason and wisdom, prudence and foresight, the lives of men and of peoples run, in large measure, otherwise than they will and wish. Still, there is in them a logic which they perceive retrospectively. The efforts and plans of the most gifted political leaders, of the men who make history, reveal themselves as vaticinatio ex eventu.
The whole war through I had compared the plans and efforts of each belligerent party with those of the other. On the German side there had plainly been preparedness, a thoroughly thought-out undertaking on a large scale, with bold intent to fashion the future development of Germany, of Europe and of the world; but the outcome had shown the fatal mistakes of a people undeniably great, a people of thinkers qualified in many ways to teach all nations. On the other side, the Allies had lacked unity, both singly and as a whole. They had no positive plan—both sides wished to win, but that is no plan—they made big political and strategical blunders,
