steady drive of intellectual force which his opponents within and without his party could not resist.

The new President concluded his first inaugural with these words:

The Nation has been deeply stirred; stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics, but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesman and interpreter, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action. This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!

Passionate sincerity shines out of these moving words. It was a spiritual moment in our history. Men were looking at life with kinder and juster eyes. A new spokesman of humanity endowed with power to diagnose the causes of domestic derangement had appeared in our politics, with a will and a purpose and a program. An eager and a nipping air seemed to blow away the atmosphere of materialism which had in varying degree hung over the Capital since Lincoln's day. Not since Jefferson had a leader with such a program dwelt at Washington. If in seventeen months a world war had not come to turn the thoughts of mankind to the defense of civilization itself, it is not immoderate to believe that the great reforms already inaugurated would have been followed by others equally vital, and the domestic policy of the Nation ordered in accordance with the best liberal thought of modern, selfgoverning communities.

But war came, apparently falling out of the blue, like some tragic drama of the high gods, upon a busy and peaceful people, bent upon working out here in a favored land some scheme of life by which every man should have the liberty, without hindrance, to be what God made him. In reality, there had arrived

the moment of explosion of confined passions and forces long gathering through the ages, the awful fruitage of centuries of human greed and incompetence, of malignant nationalistic ambitions, of scientific progress diverted from high ends to purposes of destruction, of vain and feeble puppets in places of power, of a European polity based on fear and balance of power, rather than reason and concert of action. In the twinkling of an eye, our gain-getting age became a brawling age of terror and revolution, to be thought of hereafter as the end of an old epoch and the beginning of a new epoch in human annals.

It has been often predicted that this greatest drama in history must needs be one day really written as a drama by some Æschylus who will paint the darkening sky, the rushing of the wind, the tension of the time, as catastrophe leapt to catastrophe, the movements of the bewildering antagonists amid the muttering of the storm and the lightning. In such a drama alone could one hope to find a just portrait of the peace-loving figure of the American scholar President, as he lifts his shoulders to the burdens, seeks to readjust his mind and nature, absorbed in purposes of new freedom for common men, to the tasks of the dreadful hour, and with tragic loneliness and patience grapples with events.

I saw President Wilson for the last time in the fullness of his strength on the evening of April 2, 1917. He was standing at this desk, speaking the momentous words which were to lead this democracy into war, and to teach all free peoples, then bewildered and depressed, the meaning of the conflict, and to lift up their hearts. All mankind was his audience. The air of this hall was tense with emotion, and the dullest sensed the historic significance of the great scene. There were then etched into my mind, in lines never to be erased, the face and form and manner of Woodrow Wilson-the lithe figure, the bony structure of the forehead, the lean, long visage as a covenanter, somber with fixed purpose. The culture of generations was in his tones, the scholar's artistry in his words, the inheritance of a gentleman's breeding in his manner, and calm courage in his discerning eyes. I was somehow reminded of the unbending lineaments and figure of Andrew Jackson, whom Woodrow Wilson resembled physically; and, in the very soul

of him, morally exhibiting the same grim resolution, as of a stranger to the fear that weaklings feel.

The direction of American affairs, as the Republic swept into the current of the World War, was in the hands of a liberal statesman, bred of democracy, firm of will, jealous of his country's honor, gifted with power to argue with cogency, capable of seeing far ahead the movements of social progress, incapable of fear, unmoved by passion or greed of conquest, intent upon justice, dreaming of peace and the righting of immemorial wrongs. I do not intend a résumé of the events of the two years and eight months intervening between the onset of war and the entrance of America into the struggle, but rather an analysis of what Prof. L. P. Jacks, a thoughtful English scholar to whom I am indebted for a better understanding of Woodrow Wilson, once called the "war mind" of Woodrow Wilson. To have taken any other primary step than the issuance of a declaration of neutrality in August, 1914, would have been the act of a madman or a superman, and Mr. Wilson was merely the trustee of the most powerful country on earth hitherto dedicated to the tradition of its own nonintervention in foreign affairs and the noninterference of European nations in cisatlantic problems.

The country was unfamiliar with European complications and unaware of the new international position decided for them, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, by fate and the march of events. Even the intellectuals who grasped the truth that the war was a conflict between two opposing schools of civilization would have been shocked by any other initial policy than the policy of neutrality. Military glory as an end in itself held no lure for President Wilson and no power to confuse his judgment, as his course in Mexico and his Mobile declaration had shown. I have little doubt as to where lay his sympathies from the first hour of the conflict, but he was not the man in a position of vast responsibility to be swayed by sympathy or prejudice or self-interest. Rather, he was the man, careless of fleeting judgments, to seek the position of moral responsibility imposed upon the United States and to so place its power at the service of mankind that other ages would hold it in grateful remembrance. I have read the speeches of Pres

ident Wilson from the beginning of the war to its end, and I find in them an amazing strength and unity. I am not troubled by the inconsistency of his early advocacy of peace and his later proclamation of "force to the limit," for there is no inconsistency.

As Lincoln with supreme wisdom planted his policy not on slavery but on union, Woodrow Wilson with a similar greatness tied his policy to the idea that the United States, the most powerful of all States, should be a servant, a minister, a friend, not a master among the nations. Never before in the history of mankind has a statesman of the first order made the humble doctrine of service to humanity a cardinal and guiding principle of world politics. As long as he thought this principle was best served by neutrality, we kept out of the war. The long series of diplomatic papers, the patience that endured the barbarism of the Lusitania and bore without flinching the contumely of foes and the misgivings of friends, may justly be thought of as mere incidents in the evolution of this great idea. When at last the insolent brutality of the renewal of submarine warfare taught him that force alone could advance his doctrine, he took us into war. His much derided Notes to the Imperial German Government deserve rank among the enduring documents of international history and constitute one of the most decisive arguments ever addressed to the conscience of civilization, to illustrate the solemn hesitation that ought to mark the course of rulers who carry nations into war, to give proof that in such a collapse of civilization at least one nation should retain its poise, and to unite his countrymen while he taught the world.

When on March 5, 1914, before the war, in discussing the Panama tolls, he said, "We are too big, too powerful, too selfrespecting a nation to interpret with too strained or refined a reading the words of our own promises, just because we have power enough to give us leave to read them as we please," he made clear all that subsequently possessed his mind. When a year later he said, "We do not want anything that does not belong to us. Is not a nation in that position free to serve other nations?" he revealed the heart of his policy; and so when, on the memorable night of April 2d, he asked Congress

to acknowledge a state of war, it was to a crusade, not to a war, that his statesmanlike policy had brought his countrymen; and they could not doubt that the diplomatic victory was his, the moral victory was his, that a mighty people were behind him, that the leadership of mankind rested where democracy on a continental scale had begun, in the American Republic.

In December, 1916, the President had sought through a statement by each side of its war aims to discover if any basis of peace might be found. This inquiry exhibited diplomatic genius of the first order, for it enraged the Germans and aided the Allies to consolidate their moral position before the world. The great achievement was obscured for a moment by a storm of obloquy from superheated patriots who misread the grim humor and misinterpreted his precise language when he declared that all sides, according to their own general statement to their own people, had the same aims.

Again, on January 22, 1917, Mr. Wilson for the last time sought mediation in a speech in which he defined the fundamental conditions of a permanent peace. No greater state paper than this exists in the records of modern states. The result of this masterstroke was to bring us nearer war, but also nearer to lasting peace, to establish him still more closely as the one dispassionate voice of mankind, and again to bring upon him an outburst of condemnation for his noblest pre-war utterance in which he used, but explained none too skillfully, the phrase "peace without victory," by which he meant that only a reconciled Europe could be a tranquil and stable Europe, and that community of power must succeed balance of power.

Still preoccupied with the thought of lasting peace, Mr. Wilson appeared before the Congress in the early winter of 1918, at the darkest moments of the allied fortunes, and formulated fourteen points of peace. These generalizations were almost revolutionary in their scope and idealism and ultimately formed the general basis of the peace to be drafted; but they carried, too, a political adroitness aiming directly at putting an end to the fighting. They planted new seeds of aspiration and new hopes of justice between nations in the minds of men; and it is not easy to ostracize such ideas. Its timeliness, as well as