Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/146

110 no HARVARD LAW REVIEW With his glorious gift of clear and concise expression he rendered the tangled chains of events intelligible and simple to remember; again avoiding the monotony of one thing following another chronologically, he added much fascination to his story by making a panorama-like sketch of a vast situation; and again he would paint in the minutest details an important action in which perhaps he himself took part as the driving impulse or as a silent witness. His comments on the situations and the people therewith con- nected or responsible for them were sometimes favorable, some- times not, but always frank and fair and above all most logical. His criticism of the Siamese government, however severe, was given in such a delicate expression that none of us could have felt hurt, although it always had the full effect upon everybody. His judgment deserves to our mind the greatest confidence by the one fact that he was a citizen of the United States, a country politically disinterested in Siam but very friendly to her. His personal integrity and fairmindedness would exclude any kind of prejudice or misrepresentation of facts. Mr. Westengard, keen observer as he was, understood human nature, which, he used to say, "is governed by more or less the same kinds of passions, whether Eastern or Western . . . composed of strength and weakness, greatness and selfishness." If all the people of the West had understood as well as Mr. Westengard did the nature of Oriental peoples, many grievous hours would have been avoided. Although he shared with us the love and veneration for those who so wisely have guided our little nation through the period of adolescence, yet he was not blinded by the glory of their achieve- ments, like the rest of us, but could give us a fairer estimate of their real worth, their human weakness and errors, but also their praiseworthy qualities. We do not feel deprived of that mysterious respect and confidence of Easterners for their great ones; on the contrary, our admiration grows with his words, because he has added a touch of the purely human to their other almost divine qualities. He showed us that those men did not do miracles, but did more: they were possessed of wonderful human resourcefulness. • The fact that Mr. Westengard did so much and so well for the happiness of Siam we could learn from everybody out there, but to hear him give account in such a modest and unassumiag way