Carrying the red rose he went about Texas, helped governors to govern better. But Texas was too narrow, House wanted something more majestic for his dedication. Woodrow Wilson became the man of his ultimate choice. House now gave him the red rose. ‘We have,’ wrote House, almost immediately they met each other, ‘found ourselves in such complete sympathy, in so many ways, that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself.’ And Wilson soon said to House, ‘My dear friend, we have known one another always.’

It is this having known one another always, known one another forever, that makes for the marriage of wisdom and true power. ‘Never before,’ wrote House, ‘have I found both the man and the opportunity.’ And here is a picture of Wilson at that time. ‘His learning,’ wrote William Bayard Hale, ‘is precisely of the degree and the kind best calculated to impress the populace. He wears all the outward marks of the scholar, fulfils the popular idea of a philosopher who confers honour upon the sordid concerns of political life by bringing to them high thoughts and ideals amidst which he lived so long in cloistered contemplation.’ Colonel House was behind Wilson: ‘My second personality . . . my independent self.’ And behind Colonel House was God!

Woodrow Wilson, finally elected president, offers House a place in the cabinet. House refuses the offer. ‘His goal was,’ writes the biographer, ‘to exert influence upon men who held political office.’ House had a ‘rare ability to detach himself from the heat of the political battle, coolly to appraise the essential elements of a situation and then, quietly and without waste motion, to address himself to the tasks which most tellingly advanced his patron’s interests’. For says another critic, ‘House almost had oriental modesty, a Chinese self-effacement.’

This—somewhat the picture of a Chinese sage—the raja guru. For ‘the monarch of the White House’9 who was Woodrow Wilson, House was the guru. House played the guru, without being one—and thus created the catastrophe that followed: he failed Wilson at the Paris peace talks, never saw him again, the League failed, and thus in a confused world, rose Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. And thus on to the Second World War.

In a similar way Gandhi failed himself, he never could be the guru of Nehru, thus came the catastrophe of Pakistan, and the massacres and the failure of India as a moral force in the world.

‘In other words,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘the criterion of growth in civilisation is progress toward self-determination—the progress toward self-determination is a prosaic formula for desiring the miracle by which Life enters into its Kingdom.’

VIII