But more serious than this, he was not only insensitive to his surroundings in the external sense, he was not sensitive to his environment at all.

What chance could such a man have against Mr.Lloyd George's unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him?
To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's buff in that party.

Never could a man have stepped into the parlor a more perfect and predestined victim to the finished accomplishments of the Prime Minister.

The Old World was tough in wickedness anyhow; the Old World's heart of stone might blunt the sharpest blade of the bravest knight-errant.

But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary.
But if the President was not the philosopher-king, what was he?
After all he was a man who had spent much of his life at a University.