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The Significance. These two volumes are not "memoirs." They consist of the letters and telegrams Colonel House wrote and those he received,* the gaps in the narrative being filled in from a journal or record of the substance of his important conversations, which during this period he dictated every evening to his secretary. The book is therefore no apology. From its nature it magnifies Colonel House, forces him to the centre of the stage. The result has already shown itself in criticism by the admirers of President Wilson. Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar of Tennessee last week exploded: "It is the grossest piece of effrontery for this unknown man from Texas, whom no one ever heard of, to seek to show that Woodrow Wilson was a puppet. Of all the brazen effrontery, this is the worst. He is guilty of the basest ingratitude." Said Senator Caraway: "There is one thing that Colonel House absolutely proved, and that is the old French proverb that no man is ever a hero to his valet." He referred to Colonel House as "this little man that no one ever would have heard of but for his boot-licking proclivities."
But such critics had best beware, for House's book will strike back at them. It is not a record of what House now wants the world to think. It is documentary evidence, prepared at the time, of what House actually did and said from 1912 to 1917. If House wrote Wilson in 1915 advising him not to do something, his letter carries a great deal more force than would a criticism by House today of an act of 1915.