These addresses of President Woodrow Wilson represent only the most
recent phase of his intellectual activity. They are almost entirely
concerned with political affairs, and more specifically with defining
Americanism. It will not be forgotten, however, that the life of Mr.
Wilson as President of the United States is but a short period compared
with the whole of his public career as professor of jurisprudence,
history, and politics, as President of Princeton University, as Governor
of New Jersey, as an orator, and as a writer of many books.
Surprise has been expressed that a man, after reaching the age of fifty,
should be able to step from the "quiet" life of a teacher and author
into the resounding regions of politics; but Mr. Wilson's life as a
scholar, professor, and author was not at all quiet in the sense of
being easy or untouched with exciting chances and changes, and, in the
second place, he carried into politics the steadying ideals and the
methodical habits of his former occupation.
As these addresses themselves prove, he has retained something of the
teacher's interest in showing the relation between specific instances
and the general forms of thought or action of which they are a part. Not
fact alone, but principle, is what he seeks to discover to his
audiences. In the addresses made in 1913 it is apparent that his main
effort was to fasten attention upon the principles of international
justice and good will and to restrain the impulses of those Americans
who were inclined to hasty action with reference to Mexico. From the
beginning of the Great War to a point not much earlier than our own
entrance into the struggle, he counselled neutrality and inaction, with
what motives one must judge from his statements and from events. Only a
few speeches belonging to this period have been included in the present
collection. When it became practically certain that war between the
United States and Germany was inevitable, there came into his utterances
a new temper and a more direct kind of eloquence. With scarcely an
exception, this collection includes every one of his addresses made
between August, 1916, and February, 1918.
Some of the addresses are state papers, read to Congress, and were
carefully composed. Others, delivered in various places, appear to have
been more or less extemporaneous. All are full of their author's
political philosophy, and many of them contain expressions of his
opinions on general subjects, such as personal character and conduct.
In order more fully to appreciate the weight of experience and the
maturity of reflection which give value to his words, it will be worth
while to consider Mr. Wilson's entire career as a scholar and man of
letters, paying particular attention to the growth of his political
ideals and to the qualities of his style.
To be a literary artist, a writer must possess a constructive
imagination. He must be a man of feeling and have the gift of imparting
to others some share of his own emotions. On almost every page of
President Wilson's writings, as in almost all his policies, whether
educational or political, is stamped the evidence of shaping, visionary
power. Those of us who have known him many years remember well that in
his daily thought and speech he habitually proceeded by this same poetic
method, first growing warm with an idea and then by analogy and figure
kindling a sympathetic heat in his hearers.
The subjects that may excite an artist's imagination are infinitely
numerous and belong to every variety of conceivable life. A Coleridge or
a Renan will make literature out of polemical theology; a Huxley will
write on the physical basis of life with emotion and in such a way as to
infect others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will give
what color he please to the story of a nation and compel all but the
most wary readers to see as through his eyes. We are too much accustomed
to reserve the title of literary artist for the creator of fiction,
whether in prose or in verse. Mr. Wilson is no less truly an artist
because the vision that fires his imagination, the vision he has spent
his life in making clear to himself and others and is now striving to
realize in action, is a political conception. He has seen it in terms of
life, as a thing that grows, that speaks, that has faced dangers, that
is full of promise, that has charm, that is fit to stir a man's blood
and demand a world's devotion; no wonder he has warmed to it, no wonder
he has clothed it in the richest garments of diction and rhythm and
figure.
There are small artists and great artists. Granted an equal portion of
imagination and an equal command of verbal resources, and still there
will be this difference. It is an affair of more or less intellectual
depth and more or less character. If character were the only one of
these two things to be considered in the case of Mr. Wilson's writings,
one might with little or no hesitation predict that the best of them
would long remain classics. They are full of character, of a high and
fine character. They have a tone peculiar to themselves, like a man's
voice, which is one of the most unmistakable properties of a man. It
would be no reflection on an author to say that his point of view in
fundamental matters had changed in the course of thirty or forty years;
but the truth is that with reference to his great political ideal Mr.
Wilson's point of view has not widely changed. The scope of his survey
has been enlarged, he has filled up the intervening space with a
thousand observations, he sees his object with a more penetrating and
commanding eye; but it is the same object that drew to itself his
youthful gaze, and has had its part in making him
"The generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought."
The world, in time, will judge of the amount of knowledge and the degree
of purely intellectual force that Mr. Wilson has applied in his field of
study. A contemporary cannot well pronounce such a judgment, especially
if the province be not his own.
In the small space at my disposal I shall try, first, to say what I
think is the political conception or idea upon which Mr. Wilson has
looked so steadily and with so deep emotion that he has made of it a
poetical subject. And then I shall venture to distinguish those
processes of imagination, that artistic method, which we call style, by
which he has elucidated its meaning for his readers so as to win for it
their intelligent and moved regard. The inquiry will take into account
his earliest book, _Congressional Government_, published in 1885,
_Division and Reunion_, 1893, _An Old Master and Other Political
Essays_, 1893, _Mere Literature and Other Essays_, 1896, _George
Washington_, 1897, _The State_, written 1889, rewritten 1898, _A History
of the American People_, 1902, _Constitutional Government in the United
States_, 1908, and a volume, issued very recently in England, containing
some of the President's statements on the war and entitled _America and
Freedom_.
Like a strong current through these works runs the doctrine that in a
good government the law-making power should be also the administering
power and should bear full and specific responsibility; safeguards
against ill-considered action being provided in two directions, by the
people on the one hand, and on the other hand by law and custom, these
latter being considered historically, as an organic growth. He finds the
elements and essentials of this doctrine in our Constitution, though
somewhat obscured by the old "literary" theory of checks and balances.
He finds it more fully acknowledged in the British Constitution. He
finds it originating in our English race, enunciated at Runnymede,
developing by a slow but natural growth in English history, sanctioned
in the Petition of Right, the Revolution of 1688, and the Declaration of
Rights, achieved for us in our own Revolution, and illustrated by the
implied powers of Congress and the more directly exercised powers of the
House of Commons. It is a corollary of this doctrine that the President
of the United States, to whom in the veto and in his peculiar relations
to the Senate our Constitution gives a very real legislative function,
should associate himself closely with Congress, not merely as one who
may annul but also as one who initiates policies and helps to translate
them into laws. In his _Congressional Government_, begun when he was a
student in Princeton and finished before he was twenty-eight years old,
Mr. Wilson clearly indicates his dissatisfaction with the tradition
which would set the executive apart from the legislative power as a
check against it and not a cooeperating element; and it is a remarkable
proof of the man's integrity and persistent personality that one of his
first acts as President was to go before the Congress as if he were its
agent.
If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his
rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that
the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public
opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of
governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the
rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century and
have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the Continent of
Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this country, as
a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all that concerns
jurisprudence, we Americans belong.
The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined
legislative-administrative power is, he declares, national respect for
the spirit of those general legal conceptions which, through many
centuries, have been making themselves part and parcel of our racial
instinct. He perceives that the British Constitution, though unwritten,
is as effective as ours and commands obedience fully as much as ours,
and that both appeal to a certain ingrained legal sense, common to all
the English-speaking peoples. These peoples do not really have
revolutions. What we call the American Revolution was only the
reaffirming of principles which were as precious in the eyes of most
Englishmen as they were in the eyes of Washington, Hamilton, and
Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar
circumstances, neglected or contravened. Political development in this
family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by
evolution. On all these points his _Constitutional Government in the
United States_ is only a richer and more mature statement and
illustration of the ideas expressed in his _Congressional Government_.
The main thesis of his _George Washington_ is that the great Virginian
and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern
Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action. Again and again he pays respect to
Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the
conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more
sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable
of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson
has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke
has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of
book and teacher is significant. _Mere Literature_ shows how Mr. Wilson
revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their
lessons well. In _An Old Master and Other Essays_, he had already borne
witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as
compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics
the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic
processes.
Mr. Wilson's _Division and Reunion_ is an admirable treatment of a
question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a
Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known text-book
_The State_, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses
the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the
administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of
medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in
detail of the functions and objects of government, with special
reference to law and its workings. His _History of the American People_,
though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that comes
from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repetitious. A
great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it
should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical
exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is insufficient as
a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it really is.
Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of
the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period
after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their faults, the
administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of enormous
difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and intemperance. The
disadvantage of having been written originally under pressure in monthly
instalments, for a periodical, is clearly visible in the _History_.
There is a too constant effort to catch the eye with picturesque
description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others, Mr. Wilson
evokes in his readers a noble image of that government, constitutional,
traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the days of his
youth, aroused in him a poetic enthusiasm.
And now for the way his imagination works and clothes itself in
language. The quality of his mind is poetic, and his style is highly
figurative. There have been very few professors, lecturing on abstruse
subjects, such as economics, jurisprudence, and politics, who have dared
to give so free a rein to an instinct frankly artistic. In the early
days of his career, Mr. Wilson was invited to follow two courses which
were supposed to be inconsistent with each other. The so-called
"scientific" method, much admired at that time even when applied to
subjects in which philosophic insight or a sense for beauty are the
proper guides, was being urged upon the rising generation of scholars.
Perhaps the Johns Hopkins University was the center of this impulse in
America; at least it was thought to be, though the source was almost
wholly German. If he had had to be a dry-as-dust in order to be a writer
on politics and history, Mr. Wilson would have preferred to turn his
attention to biography and literary criticism. But he promptly resolved
to disregard the warnings of pedants and to be a man of letters
_though_ a professor of history and politics. I well remember the
irritation, sometimes amused and sometimes angry, with which he used to
speak of those who were persuaded that scholarship was in some way
contaminated by the touch of imagination or philosophy. He at least
would run the risk. And so he set himself to work cultivating the graces
of style no less assiduously than the exactness of science. There is a
distinct filiation in his diction, by which, from Stevenson to Lamb and
from Lamb to Sir Thomas Browne, one can trace it back to the quaint old
prose writers of the seventeenth century. I remember his calling my
attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic
qualities of those worthies. Many of his colors are from their
ink-horns, in which the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he
is sententious and didactic he seems to have caught something of
Emerson's manner. And indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of
optimism and a slightly dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and
persuasive, tone which he has in common with the New England sage.
But in spite of all these resemblances to older authors, Mr. Wilson
gives proof in his style of a masterful independence. He is constantly
determined to think for himself, to get to the bottom of his subject,
and finally to express the matter in terms of his own personality.
Especially is this evident in his early works, where he struggles
manfully to be himself, even in the choice of words and phrases,
weighing and analyzing the most current idioms and often making in them
some thoughtful alteration the better to express his exact meaning. His
literary training appears to have been almost wholly English. There are
few traces in his writings of any classical reading or of any first-hand
acquaintance with French, German, or Italian authors. And indeed in the
substance of his thought I wonder if he is sufficiently hospitable to
foreign ideas, especially to the vast body of comment on the French
Revolution. I imagine few Continental authorities would agree with him
in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of that great
movement, which he seems to regard with almost unmitigated disapproval.
In Mr. Wilson's addresses and public letters concerning the War he
re-affirms his principles and applies them with high confidence to the
fateful problems of this time. His tone has become vastly deeper and
sounder since he made his great decision, and from his Speech to
Congress, on February 3, 1917, to his recent Baltimore appeal, it has
rung true to every good impulse in the hearts of our people. His letter
to the Pope is in every way his master-piece, in style, in temper, and
in power of thought. He has led his country to the place it ought to
occupy, by the side of that other English democracy whose institutions,
ideals, and destiny are almost identical with our own, as he has
demonstrated in the writings of half a lifetime. Let us hope there was
prophetic virtue in a passage of his _Constitutional Government_, where,
speaking of the relation between our several States and the Union that
binds them together, he says they "may yet afford the world itself the
model of federation and liberty it may in God's providence come to
seek."
No one can rise from a perusal of the great mass of Mr. Wilson's
writings without an almost oppressive sense of his unremitting and
strenuous industry. From his senior year in college to the present day
he has borne the anxieties and responsibilities of authorship. The work
has been done with extreme conscientiousness in regard to accuracy and
clearness of thinking and with sedulous care for justness and beauty of
expression. It might well crown a life with honor. And when we remember
the thousands of his college lectures and the hundreds of his
miscellaneous addresses which have found no record in print, when we
recall the labors of university administration which crowded upon him in
middle life, when we consider the spectacle of his calm, prompt,
orderly, and energetic performance of public duty in these latter years,
our admiration for the literary artist is enhanced by our profound
respect for the man.[A]
[A] A considerable part of this Introduction appeared originally as an
article in _The Princeton Alumni Weekly_.