Hook. PRr:sKNTi;n nv PRESIDENT WILSON HIS PROBLEMS AND HIS POLICY AN ENGLISH VIEW H. WILSON HARRIS NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES CO FOURTH AVENUE 1917 'H3 i) TO MY WIFE FOREWORD TO AMERICAN READERS If this book has any value in America it will be as the embodiment of what I think I may. claim to be a typical English view of American politics. The term typical perhaps needs a little qualifica- tion. I cannot pretend to be entirely free from a certain pro-American bias, though I hope I have not allowed it to colour what I have written. (^uite apart from the circumstances of this war, I am profoundly convinced that America and Great Britain have a great destiny to work out in common which they can never accom- plish separately. If that is so it is of the first importance that the two countries should know each other better and understand each other better. Americans are probably better informed about English affairs than Englishmen about American afifairs — though my American friends are disposed to question this — but there is mani- festly much more room for fuller knowledge on either side. My sketch of President Wilson has been written with the purpose of introducing current American FOREWORD TO AMERICAN READERS problems, as well as a great American personality, to English readers. It may contain false judg- ments. It must almost inevitably contain technical inaccuracies. But I think it is at least a fair representation of what Englishmen who have tried to understand America think of America. If we misunderstand, this concrete example of the misunderstanding may stimulate some qualified American writer to correct our views. National Liberal Club, London April igiy PREFACE One of the more valuable of the indirect results of the war has been to reveal how little America is understood, and how necessary it is that she should be understood, in this country. At the present moment we are in danger of committing ourselves to a series of false judgments. The average Englishman's real interest in the United States and its present President dates from August 19 1 4, and he is under an inevitable but unfortu- nate temptation to form sweeping estimates of a nation and a man on the basis of their attitude towards one particular issue, and that an issue of great complexity, over a space of little more than two years. Such estimates may by an accident be accurate, but if so it can only be by an accident. Without entering into thait, I have aimed here at presenting data^ bearing on the President of the United States and the problems he has to face, covering a wider field and a longer period. The relations between Great Britain and America will be among the most powerful factors in world politics after the war. 8 PREFACE and if those relations are to be what they should be and might be, it is essential that the two peoples should know and understand one another. It is in the hope that it may make some small con- tribution to the further development of such an understanding that this book has been written. The American biographies of Mr. Wilson are not well known in this country, and, in any case, they take for granted a knowledge of American institutions and traditions which the English reader naturally does not possess. Now that President Wilson is about to enter on a second four years of office it is time an EngUsh life was written. As for myself, my chief title to attempt such a task is a lively consciousness of my own limita- tions. Having devoted what time I could in the past few years to an endeavour to diminish my own ignorance of America, I have written on the assumption that what I needed to know other people may need to know too. This biography purports to be neither a criticism nor an appre- ciation, nor what is sometimes a little grandilo- quently described as an interpretation. All I have attempted to do is to state the plain facts of President Wilson's career since he first entered public life, and to indicate in broad outline the nature of the political and social problems that are engaging him and all men of thought and action in America to-day. It has seemed to me PREFACE 9 more useful to provide material for judgments than to obtrude a series of judgments of my own. I am greatly indebted to Mr. G. V. Seldes, late of Harvard, who has read my proofs and made a number of valuable suggestions. H. WILSON HARRIS. London, January 1917. NOTE The breach between America and Germany took place after the manuscript of this book had left my hands. It has not been necessary to alter anything already written, but a few pages have been added to Chapter IX (" The European War "), carrying it down to the actual severance of diplomatic relations. H. W. H. February 19 17. CONTENTS CIAPTKK PAGK I. EARLY YEARS . . . . . .13 II. PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON . . . .25 III. GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY . . . .43 IV. THE 1912 ELECTION . . . . .65 V. THE NEW president's PROSPECTS . . .78 VI. THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE . . . .90 Vll. THE MEXICAN PROBLEM . . . • II3 VIII. FOREIGN POLICY AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE . 1 33 IX. THE EUROPEAN WAR. . . . -153 X. PREPAREDNESS AND PERMANENT PEACE . . 188 XI. LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM . . • 213 XII. RE-ELECTION ...... 227 XIII. THE FUTURE . . . . . .244 APPENDIX — AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS 257 INDEX ...... . 273 MAPS NEW JERSEY ..... opposite p. 43 MEXICO . . . . . . „ 112 UNITED STATES . . . . . „ 227 PRESIDENT WILSON CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS We are confused by a war of interests, a clash of classes, a com- petition of powers, an effort at conquest and restraint, and the great forces which war and toil amongst us can be guided and reconciled only by some man who is truly a man of the people, not caught in the toils of any special interest, united by wide sympathy with many kinds of men, familiar with many aspects of life, and led, through many changes, to a personal experience which unites him with the common mass. — Lincoln Centenary Address, 1909.' WOODROW Wilson is an American of the second generation. His father's father, James Wilson, an Ulsterman from County Down, landed at Phila- delphia to seek his fortune in 1807. His mother's father, the Rev. Thomas Woodrow, a Scotch Pres- byterian minister who had held a charge at Carlisle for sixteen years and then migrated to Canada, crossed the American border in 1837 and settled at Chillicothe, Ohio, as pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in that town. James Wilson, the immigrant, rapidly found his feet at Philadelphia, where he secured a post on Duane's Democratic journal, the Aurora, published ' The passages at the head of each chapter are from Mr. Wilson's writings and speeches. 13 14 PRESIDENT WILSON where the greatest of American journalists, Ben- jamin Franklin, had turned out his unpretentious sheets nearly a century before. But Philadelphia was not to be the goal of young Wilson's pilgrim- age. The drang nacfi westen that followed the restoration of peace with England in 1814 laid hold of the young journalist -printer, and carried him inland over the Pennsylvanian border into Ohio. There he settled first at Steubenville, the capital of Jefferson County, and then at Pittsburg, establishing in the former town the Western Herald and in the latter (which lies on the eastern side of the Ohio -Pennsylvania border) the Penn- sylvania Advocate. It was at Steubenville that President Wilson's father and mother first met. The youngest of James Wilson's seven sons was Joseph Ruggles, who after a sound education at Jefferson College at Canonsburg, in Pennsylvania, supplemented by a year at the Western Theo- logical Seminary and another at Princeton, had been licensed as a preacher in the Presbyterian Church, and then appointed, not to a pulpit, but to a post in the Steubenville Male Academy. At the same time Dr. Thomas Woodrow's daughter Janet was a pupil at the companion academy for girls. A friendship, and then an intimacy, sprang up, and in 1849 Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow were married. Joseph Wilson was ordained by the Presbytery of Ohio almost immediately after his wedding, but he continued his educational work at Steubenville, and then successively at Jefferson College and at Hampden Sydney College, Virginia, till 1855, EARLY YEARS 15 when he accepted his first pastorate at Staunton, Virginia. In the following year, on December 28, 1856, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. There were already two girls in the family, and a younger boy was born ten years later. There was a singular fitness in the chance that made Staunton Woodrow Wilson's birthplace ; for the Old Dominion, Virginia dives avum, had given America four out of her first five Presidents — Washington and Jefi"erson, Madison and Monroe. By his origin no less than by his office Dr. Wilson stands heir to great traditions. Those who will can convince themselves with no great difficulty that the influences of the warm and generous South have left their mark equally with his Scotch and Irish ancestry in salient traits of the President's character. Little of Woodrow Wilson's childhood was spent at Staunton, for in 1858 the family moved south to Augusta, in Georgia, a prosperous industrial town, where in a twelve years' pastorate the Rev. Joseph Wilson established a solid reputation as one of the foremost ministers of his denomination in the South. When Woodrow was four years old the Civil War broke out. The earliest recollec- tion clear in his memory is that of two men meeting in the street outside his father's house and one of them declaring, " Lincoln is elected, and there'll be war." The Wilsons were strong Southerners, but they came into little personal contact with the war. Till Sherman's men came marching through Georgia in 1864 the State had lain outside the theatres oi active warfare, 1 6 PRESIDENT WILSON and Sherman himself left Augusta to his right as he swept north-west from Savannah to Atlanta. There were sundry alarms in the town, but none of them had substance, and all Woodrow Wilson saw of the war was an occasional body of Con- federates riding off to join the army, and Jefferson Davis himself passing through in 1865 in the hands of the Federals to his imprisonment in Fort Monroe. President Wilson was born too late in the nine- teenth century for any such romantic boyhood as fell to the lot of Washington on the frontier or Lincoln and Garfield in the backwoods. His education followed conventional lines, and in its earlier stages, at any rate, it brought to light no marked foreshadowings of the gifts that have raised the President to the position he holds to- day. Joseph Wilson was eminently wise in the training of his son. No attempt was made to force the boy's formal education. He was over nine before he had learned to read ; but long before that his mind was being developed and shaped by constant companionship and talk with his father, and he was already familiar with much of Scott and Dickens from the novels read aloud to the family in the Augusta manse. Father and son took long walks together, sometimes in the country, sometimes to inspect the factories and engineering shops and foundries in which the industrial life of Augusta centred. To this best of all forms of education, contact with a fertile, alert^ and sympathetic mind, was added such further training as was dealt out to a group of Augusta EARLY YEARS 17 youngsters at a school kept by a Mr. J. T. Derry, who had laid aside his rifle after Appomattox and diverted his energies from the destruction of the North to the instruction of the South. After four years under the soldier -schoolmaster's ferule, vvoodrow Wilson (known at that time to his family and friends as Tom) rounded off his school life with another period of four years at an academy at Columbia, South Carolina, his father having obtained a professorship at the theological seminary in that town in 1870. The transition from school to university is a permanent landmark in the experience of every boy whose education is not cut short at the secondary stage ; and by the time Woodrow Wilson was taking leave of the Columbia academy and breaking ground at Davidson College, North Carolina, to which he now proceeded, he had reached an age at which public events were likely increasingly to arrest his interest and stimulate his thought. He had been too young at the time of the Civil War to be alive to its issues. He was a child of four when the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, a little more than eight when the tragic news of Lincoln's murder plunged South and North alike into mourning. The vicis- situdes of Andrew Johnson's calamitous adminis- tration were little calculated to stir the interest of a boy of twelve ; but when, with Grant's suc- cession, the work of reconstruction and recon- ciliation was put in hand in earnest, it would have been strange if no dawning sense of citizenship and responsibility for a share in the work of 2 1 8 PRESIDENT WILSON rebuilding the nation had impressed itself on the mind of a youth just passing from school to the larger world of the university. Wilson, it must be remembered, was a pure Southerner, who never crossed the Potomac till he set out for his first term at Princeton in 1875, but he was born a few years too late to know from experience the embitterment that preceded the actual outbreak. Now secession had been tried and failed. The fundamental principle for which the Northerners had fought, the maintenance of the Union, was vindicated. The South, weary and stricken after its four years' fight against hope- less odds, was as ready as the North to live in the spirit of Lincoln's great exhortation and strive to " bind up the nation's wounds, ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace." It was a time of re -formation and recon- struction. While Woodrow Wilson was building up his manhood the nation was rebuilding its shattered fabric. The South, in particular^ was schooling itself to a new conception of political principles. We can hardly be wrong in ascribing to these vital years the origin of that intense interest in the principles of government which Dr. Wilson has exhibited through the whole of his educational and political career. The terms university and college are practically interchangeable in America, and the institutions so described represent every level of educational efficiency. Davidson College, North Carolina, to which young Wilson passed on from the school at Columbia, was not of the highest grade, but it EARLY YEARS 19 formed an adequate stepping-stone to Princeton, whither his father decided to send him after his course at Davidson had been interrupted at the end of his first year by an illness that necessitated a year of comparative rest. This year (1874-5) was spent at Wilmington, a North Carolina sea- port, where the Rev. Joseph Wilson now held a charge. The town had considerable historic interest, and migration thither enabled tlie future President, at the age of seventeen, to get his first glimpse of the sea, an experience still foreign to some millions of his fellow-countrymen. In September 1875 Woodrow Wilson matricu- lated at Princeton. The New Jersey foundation, of which it will be necessary to speak more fully in the following chapter, claims to rank third to Harvard and Yale among the greater universities of America. It has a history of 170 years behind it, and has numbered James Madison among its graduates and Jonathan Edwards among its Presidents. In Wilson's year there was an entry of about 130, amongst whom he took a creditable place, but achieved no out- standing distinction. His " class " (i.e. the entry of his year) produced forty-two honours men in the graduating year 1879, Wilson standing forty- first on the list. For the benefit of those to whom such matters seem of moment, it is on record that in his senior year he measured 5 feet 1 1 inches and weighed 156 pounds. By the time he had graduated A.B. at Princeton, Wilson had con- cluded that the practice of law (in America the profession has not two branches, as in England) 20 PRESIDENT WILSON was his right vocation, and he accordingly decided to supplement his Princeton course by further study in the law school of the University of Virginia. After little more than a year his health broke down, as it had done when he was at Davidson six years earlier. In consequence he spent the year 1881 at home, and in May 1882 established himself as a practising lawyer at Atlanta, Georgia, in association with a partner named Renick. It is necessary thus to sketch the outlines of the President's education, but the bare facts themselves are of little interest or importance. Preferring deliberately to read discursively and make his explorations in fields of his own choosing, he sacrificed with small regret the prospects of purely academic distinction. Wilson's bent was definitely historical and political. At Princeton he read widely and wisely, studying particularly Chatham and Burke, Brougham and Macaulay. Bagehot was an inex- haustible mine of suggestion and inspiration. But the first serious stimulus to political thought and investigation came from a less classic source. In the Chancellor Green library at Princeton was a set of bound volumes of the Gentleman's Maga- zine, the later issues of which numbered among their leading features a running commentary on the proceedings of the British House of Commons by " The Member for the Chiltern Hundreds," one of the many pseudonyms of that veteran political journalist Sir Henry Lucy. St. Stephen's in the seventies was the arena of rhetorical battles EARLY YEARS 21 well calculated to arrest and hold the interest of any observer capable of appreciating the niceties of constitutional theory or the triumphs of parliamentary oratory and the victories of debate. The great duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was at its height. Dizzy had just " dished the Whigs " over the Reform Bill of 1867 and gone out' of office on Irish Church Disestab- lishment. The Disestablishment Act had followed in 1869 and Forster's Education Act in 1870; Cardwell was carrying through his Army reforms ; the Ballot Act was being put on the Statute Book. In 1874, the year before Wilson entered at Princeton, Gladstone had gone out and Disraeli gone in, and though within the next two years one of the two protagonists had withdrawn into nominal retirement and the other into the tran- quillity of the House of Lords, they had left behind them in the elective Chamber traditions of con- troversy that speakers like Bright and Lowe, Stanley and John Russell had done hardly less than themselves to establish. Debates sustained by men of such calibre could lack nothing in inspiration to an eager student of politics in a country whose political history, apart from the great movements led by Washington and Lincoln, and the Webster-Clay-Calhoun controversies, was comparatively uneventful. Mr. Wilson himself has testified in later years to the influence Lucy's pictures of the Chamber at Westminster had on his broadening thought. The ideas thus absorbed found early expression. At Princeton Wilson wrote and debated. In the 2 2 PRESIDENT WILSON latter field he was a little slow in coming to the front, though in his second, or sophomore, year he was awarded a second prize in Whig Hall, one of the two rival debating societies (the other was the Cliosophic) that flourished at Princeton. But by his fourth year he was recognized as the fore- most speaker in Whig Hall, and was, as a matter of course, chosen to represent it in the amiual Lynde Debate between the two college societies. The subjects on these occasions were not announced beforehand, the speakers being required to discourse extempore on a topic drawn from a hat. The topic in this particular year was Tariffs, and the chance of the draw condemned Wilson to champion Protection against Free Trade. That settled his part in the contest. Rejecting flatly any sophistic endeavour to make what he conceived to be the worse cause appear the better, he tore up the slip and retired from the debate. A substitute hastily enlisted by the Whigs proving unequal to the occasion, victory went to the Cliosophic. The interest of an episode trifling in itself lies in the evidence it affords of the depth of Wilson's political convictions at the time. Further proof of that comes from his casual writings at the same period, notable among them an essay on Chatham, for which he was awarded a prize in 1879, others on John Bright and Gladstone printed in the magazine of the University of Virginia in 1880, and an article on " Cabinet Government in the United States," over the signature Thomas W. Wilson, EARLY YEARS 23 in the International Review of August 1879. The acceptance of such a contribution by a serious review of national reputation was a notable event for a writer still in his undergraduate stage. The essay consisted of a sober and critical discussion of the element of irresponsibility in American government, due to the severance of the executive and the legislative authorities and the growing power of the numerous secret committees of Con- gress. There is undiminished force to-day in the contention that an essential condition of efficient government is a closer association between the legislative and the executive, and particularly in the conclusion that " there must nepds bie;, as a binding link between them, some body which has no power to coerce the one and is interested in maintaining the independent effectiveness of the other. Such a link is the responsible Cabinet." This article appeared in August 1879. In the same year the writer took his A.B. degree at Princeton, and, as has been stated, entered the law school at the University of Virginia. With his interrupted course at the latter foundation the period of his formal education would normally have ended, had not the bad judgment of the people of Atlanta in their choice of lawyers led to an unpremeditated change in the young attorney's plans. The establishment of the firm of Renick and Wilson in the Georgian capital has already been mentioned. The partners " hung out their shingle," as the vernacular ex- pression has it, and waited for clients. After a year of waiting the younger partner had had 24 PRESIDENT WILSON enough. If there was no opening for him to practice law he could at least teach it, and to qualify himself the better he entered, in the autumn of 1883, on a two years' post-gfaduate course at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. In 1886 he gained the degree of Ph.D. for a notable thesis on Congressional Government, to which it will be necessary to refer again. A year earlier he had accepted his first teaching post, a lectureship in history and political economy at Bryn Mawr, a women's college on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He remained at Bryn Mawr three years, lecturing at the same time at Johns Hopkins, and in 1888 was elected to the chair of history and political economy at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan was less sectarian than its name would suggest. There was an able faculty and a large nucleus of students (of both sexes) who had come to the university for serious work. But it hardly gave the Professor of History the platform his growing reputation qualified him to occupy, and after two years, in 1890, he was offered, and accepted, the chair of jurisprudence and politics at his old university, Princeton. There the next twenty years of his life were to be spent. CHAPTER II PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON The college should seek to make the men whom it receives something more than excellent servants of a trade or skilled practi- tioners of a profession. It should give them elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, so that they shall have a surplus of mind to expend, not upon their profession only, for its liberalization and enlargement, but also upon the broader interests which lie about them, in the spheres in which they are to be not breadwinners merely, but citizens as well, and in their own hearts, where they are to grow to the stature of real nobility. It is this free capital of mind the world most stands in need of — this free capital that awaits investm.ent in undertakings, spiritual as well as material, which advance the race and help all men to a better life. Inaugural Addi'ess as President of Princeton^ Ocloba 1902. Dr. Wilson's life at Princeton divides into two periods. From 1890 to 1902 he was a member of the faculty, taking his place with his colleagues as a part of the university machine. From 1902 to 191 o he was President, entrusted with the power, of which he did not hesitate to make full use, of changing the structure and adapting the operations of the machine into accordance with his own ideals. The college — or university, as it became in 1896 — was heir to honourable tradi- tions. A Presbyterian foundation, it dates back to 1746, being thus the fourth in age among American universities, Harvard, William and Mary (Virginia), and Yale alone antedating it. The 25 2 6 PRESIDENT WILSON tide of revolutionary war had flowed round it, leaving the marks of conflict on the college build- ings. In 1783 the Continental Congress held temporary session there, and it was from Princeton that Washington issued his farewell address to the Army. In recent years Princeton has been the most popular of the Northern colleges among' students from the South, a fact that no doubt had something to do with Woodrow Wilson's entry as a freshman in 1875, and made his return as a professor in 1890 the more congenial. To-day — and what is true of to-day is true of the nineties of last century — Princeton ranks with Harvard and Yale, Cornell and Columbia and Johns Hopkins, among the group of foundations recognized as representing the highest type of American universities — and the type incidentally which approximates most closely to that familiar in England. The grounds and buildings are extensive. The campus covers over five hundred acres, with a boating -lake four miles long, formed by the widening of the Millstone River at Mr. Andrew Carnegie's expense. The buildings in- clude a number of halls, residential and tutorial, of which Nassau is the oldest and most famous, while Seventy-Nine has a particular interest in connection with Mr. Wilson, since it was built at the expense of alumni of his own class of 1879. Whig and Clio Halls, to which some reference has already been made,' are the homes of the two chief literary societies at Princeton. Within the last few years an extensive graduate school has ' P. 22. PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 27 been added under circumstances which, it will be seen, closely affected Mr. Wilson's position as President of the University. The number of students, which twenty years ago stood at some- thing under a thousand, is now over sixteen hundred. When the new professor took up his work in September 1890 he had been married just five years. His wife, formerly Miss Ellen Louise Axson, was an old Augusta acquaintance, the daughter of a Savannah minister. Their marriage had taken place in June 1885, a few months before Mr. Wilson began his work at Bryn Mawr. Since this is a political r^-ther than a personal biography, it is sufficient to add here that there were three daughters of the marriage ; that after a married life of twenty-nine years Mrs. Wilson died at the White House in August 19 14, in the second year of her husband's Presidency ; and that in December 191 5 Mr, Wilson was married to Mrs. Norman Gait, formerly Miss Ediih Boiling, of Wythesville, Virginia. The twelve years of Dr. Wilson's professorship at Princeton were uneventful. As a lecturer his popularity was great, the earnestness of the true teacher being seasoned by a quiet and cultured humour that made attendance at his courses a matter as much of pleasure as of profit. He knew his men personally, and his house in Library Place was always open to the students, who took full advantage of the standing invitation extended to them. While his position at Princeton was being steadily strengthened both by the force of his 28 PRESIDENT WILSON personality and by his success as a lecturer, his name was becoming increasingly advertised through the country by the books he found time to publish before the more exacting duties of President of the University curtailed his literary activity. The first and best known of these, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, was indeed established as a standard authority on American government before Mr. Wilson's return to Princeton. He had put it in as thesis for his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1885, and on its publication in the same year it had achieved a success comparable, among univer- sity theses, only with Mr. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, first written as an Oxford prize exer- cise. Congressional Government has already run through close on thirty impressions. In 1889, Mr. Wilson's second year at Wesleyan University, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, a study of different forms of government, had appeared. A pioneer text- book in the field of political science, The State gained for its author recognition at the hands of a competent P^nglish critic ' as the foremost, if not the first, of those who rendered possible the intelligent study of a department of sociology upon which the happiness and good government of the human race essentially depend." With the exception of these two notable works and The New Freedom, a collection of cam- paign speeches published in 1913, after his elec- tion as President, all Mr. Wilson's books were ' Oscar Browning, Preface to 1899 eiiition of The State, PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 29 issued during the periods of his professorship and presidency at Princeton. In 1893 Division and Reunion, 1829-188 9, a study of the ultimate springs and effects of the Civil War, appeared, and the same year saw the pubUcation of a collection of essays grouped under the title An Old Master. In 1896 George Washington, a singularly human and attractive appreciation of the liberator of the American colonies, was pub- lished, and coincidently with it another essay volume bearing the name Mere Literature. In the year of Dr. Wilson's election to the presidency of the university his lengthiest work, a History of the American People, in five volumes, made its appearance, to be followed six years later by the last of his treatises on the theory of govern- ment, Constitutional Government in the United States. It is hardly matter for surprise that the responsibilities attaching to the Governorship of New Jersey and the Presidency of the United States should in the past six years have left scant leisure for literary production. In June 1902 the President of Princeton, Dr. Francis Landey Patton, resigned, and three months later, at the beginning of the new academical year, Dr. Woodrow Wilson succeeded to his office, the appointment falling by universal consent to the member of the faculty whose writings and occasional addresses, principally on educational subjects, outside Princeton had won him distinc- tion such as none of his colleagues could claim. The presidency had never before been held by a lavman. 30 PRESIDENT" WILSON The opening of Mr. Wilson's public career may more properly be fixed in 1902, when he became President of Princeton, than in 19 10, when he was elected Governor of New Jersey. The importance of a university president in America is not to be appreciated from any analogy drawn between Yale or Harvard or Princeton and Oxford or Cam- bridge, still less between the American founda- tions and an individual Oxford or Cambridge college. Parallels have been drawn between the President of Princeton and the Master of Trinity or the Dean of Christ Church. The comparison is misleading. The university in America holds a larger place in the life of the nation than in either England or Scotland, and the prestige attaching to its Presidency is correspondingly enhanced. Lord Bryce in his American Com- monwealth ' dwells on the " almost monarchical position " of the President within the university. " His powers," he adds, " in the management of the institution and the selection of professors are much greater than those of the head of an English or Scottish university. But he is often also a leading figure in the State, perhaps even in the nation. No persons in the country, hardly even the greatest railway magnates, are better known, and certainly none are more respected, than the Presidents of the leading universities." It may be observed in addition that geographically Princeton, particularly in view of its strong Southern connection, tended to provide a more effective platform than Harvard in Massachusetts, ' Vol. ii. chap. cix. PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 31 or Yale in Connecticut, or Cornell in New York State . But it was less in the public position it gave him than in the opportunity it afforded for the display in action of his fearless and constructive radicalism that his acceptance of the Presidency of Princeton marked a new starting-point in Mr. Wilson's career. Not that there is any breach or revolution in the development of his purposes and principles. His life has been a singularly consistent unity. We can look back from the *' direct primary " campaign in New Jersey in 191 I to the International Review article of 1879, with its assertion of " America's greatest claim to political honour — the right of every man to a voice in the government under which he lives " ; or from the Tariff legislation in 19 13 to the declaration made in 1882 by the junior partner in the firm of Renick and Wilson to a tariff com- mission visiting Atlanta, that " the only thing that free traders contend for is, that there shall be only so much duty laid as will be necessary to defray the expenses of the Government, reduce the public debt, and leave a small surplus for accumulation." But it was election to the Presi- dency of Princeton that first put administrative power into his hands and enabled him to give concrete application to those principles and doc- trines he was later to vindicate before the world on a larger stage. The keynotes of Mr. Wilson's public career may be stated, at a certain sacrifice of complete- ness in the interests of brevity, ks a profound faith 32 PRESIDENT WILSON in democracy and an indomitable enthusiasm for reform.) At Princeton the established order was aristocratic and conservative. Conservatism is a common attribute of universities, and in America it is accentuated (though there are other counter- balancing forces) by the close association main- tained between a college and its alumni, or former graduates, who naturally tend to turn a suspicious eye on threatened innovations. Dr. Wilson was under no illusions as to the task that faced him. His twelve years as professor had given him ample time to develop his convictions as to what Princeton might and should be, and to realize the gulf that separated the actual from the ideal. He had high visions of the functions of a univer- sity in the national life. " We are not at liberty," he maintained, " to use Princeton for our private purposes or to adapt her in any way to our own use and pleasure. It is our bounden duty to make her more and more responsive to the intellectual and moral needs of a great nation." In 1902 Princeton was not so responsive. It was a univer- sity for rich men's sons ; privilege and luxury — in their best form, indeed, but still privilege and luxury — were entrenched ; and the standard of scholastic attainment was unjustifiably low. There was abimdant scope for a President who con- fessed that "if to seek to go to the root is to be a radical, a radical I am." It was after he had held the presidency for some years that he told the Pittsburg alumni that " the colleges of this country must be reconstructed from top to bottom, and America is going to demand it " ; but the PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 33 conviction was already 'deeply; implanted in his mind long before he was chosen to rule over Princeton. The new President's first assault was on the mechanism of the instructional system. As a beginning the level of scholarship had to be raised. Almost immediately on taking office, therefore, Dr. Wilson appointed a committee to consider the enforcement of what had become merely nominal standards of attainment. A scheme was formulated under which men had to pass their examinations or go. Some of them went. The others learned to work. There was a short-lived outcry, particularly among the aristo- crats. Then the storm died down and Princeton settled quietly into its new stride. That, however, was no more than a preliminary move. The next reform, more fundamental but less calculated to provoke hostility, was a recasting of the academic curriculum. By the beginning of the twentieth century the revolt against the old cast-iron regime of dead languages and mathe- matics had opened the door to a freedom of choice that was in grave danger of being carried to excess. Three boys out of ten may be competent on entering college at nineteen to map out their own course of study for the next four years ; but that estimate is probably too high, and, in any case, the remaining seven will not be competent. The right compromise is clearly that the univer- sity should impose a certain groundwork of general education, and encourage its men from that starting-point to launch out on the particular study of their choice. 3 34 PRESIDENT WILSON Dr. Wilson was one of the first of American educationists to emphasize that salutary doc- trine. In his inaugural address at Princeton in 1902 he had laid it down that out of the host of studies " we must make choice, and suffer the pupil himself to make choice. But the choice we make must be the chief choice, the choice that the pupil makes the subordinate choice. We must supply the synthesis and must see to it that, whatever group of studies the student selects, it shall at least represent the round whole, contain all the elements of modern knowledge, and be itself a complete circle of general subjects." Practically applied, as Dr. Wilson forthwith applied it, that doctrine meant that for their freshman and sophomore years men followed a prescribed course of study, while as juniors and seniors they were allowed wide, though not un- fettered, liberty of choice. The " department system," or system of " group electives " (so called because the student's choice must fall within a group of studies so formulated as to give unity and sequence to his whole college course), is now generally accepted throughout American universi- ties, its wide adoption being due, not wholly indeed, but in considerable measure, to Dr. Wilson's pioneer work at Princeton. The ground thus cleared, the road lay open for the greatest of Dr. Wilson's educational reforms. At the time when he was set in authority at Princeton the provision made by the typical American university for the actual imparting of instruction was gravely inadequate. The old PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 35 *' recitation," or catechetical, method was being abandoned in favour of set lectures ; and outside the two or three hours a day spent in the lecture- room the student was left to his own almost undirected reading. There was a total lack of tutorial guidance, and, what was hardly less serious, the contact of adolescent with maturer minds was practically confined to the few hours a week given to attending lectures, and the value of these varied directly with the lecturer's capacity and the student's attention. Dr. Wilson met the situation with a bold and constructive reform. He realized the inadequacy of mere classroom teaching and the necessity of somehow providing for the personal touch, the play of mind on mind, that is the condition of true education as opposed to mere instruction. That provision was found in the preceptorial system — the creation of small groups of students associated with a tutor or professor, whose teaching was conducted through the medium of informal con- ferences, closely resembling the German seminar. The idea of such a system shaped itself early in the President's mind. In addressing a meeting of Princeton alumni at New York three months after his inauguration in 1902 he had sketched the outline of his scheme, pointing to the need for qualified instructors to act as companions and coaches and guides of the undergraduates' read- ing. " If we could get a body of such tutors at Princeton," he predicted. " we could transform the place from a place where there are youngsters doing tasks to a place where there are men doing 36 PRESIDENT WILSON thinking, men who arc conversing about the things of thought, men who are eager and interested in the things of thought." To a large extent that transformation has been effected. To secure the full benefit that might be derived from it, all the students should, ^as President Wilson realized, be domiciled, with the tutors, in the hostels or dormitories (residential halls), instead of living independently in lodgings in the neighbourhood. That further change he was able to effect in part. For freshmen and sophomores the hostel system became general. In the case of third and fourth year men the attempt to introduce it broke down under circum- stances presently to be described. But the essence of the preceptorial system was the subordination of the formal lecture to the conversational con- ference or discussion. As regards that part of his scheme Dr. Wilson's success was unqualified. Educationally it raised the existing standards to a new level, while its contribution to the social life of the university in establishing new contacts and breaking down old barriers had a different, but hardly inferior, value. The successes that marked the first half of Dr. Wilson's presidency at Princeton are not more to his credit than the failures that marked the second. He knew well at the outset that to reform Princeton education would be less for- midable an undertaking than to democratize Princeton society. But he had no thought of shrinking from either task. At the end of his fifth year as President he laid before the trustees PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 37 of the university a scheme intimately affecting the future of the students' clubs. The Princeton clubs were a characteristic feature of the life of the university. The fraternities, college societies usually denominated by two or three Greek letters (such, for example, as the Ske), familiar through- out American universities, were forbidden at Princeton, and their absence had stimulated the tendency of the wealthier students, of whom there were many, to associate in luxurious residential club-houses. There were twelve of these in the close vicinity of the campus, accommodating in all between three and four hundred men. While there was nothing to criticize in the conduct of the clubs, their existence was a stand- ing repudiation of every ideal Dr. Wilson aimed at establishing at Princeton. They perpetuated a spirit of exclusiveness and privilege, and along two distinct lines worked consistently for separation and division in the university. On the one hand, they drove a wedge between the rich man and the poor man, for the clu,bs were a luxury of the well-to-do ; on the other, they erected a permanent barrier between under- graduates of the first two and the last two years, since neither freshmen nor sophomores were eligible for membership. At the same time they wer6 so firmly established in the life of the society that on many men the hope of election to a par- ticular club exerted a much more effective influence than the hope of academic distinction. Nothing could be more alien to Dr. Wilson's idea of what a university should be, and no one 38 PRESIDENT WILSON familiar with his character could suppose that he would be content to leave institutions so detrimental to the true interests of Princeton untouched. He made no direct attack on the system. He rarely chose destructive methods where constructive would serve his ends. In 1907 he laid before the trustees of the university proposals for the re- organization of Princeton on lines approximating to the college system at Oxford or Cambridge, with the difference, however, that the whole of the teaching would remain in the hands of the university itself. The proposed residential halls were therefore to be of the nature of hostels, men being so distributed that rich and poor, elder and younger, would be thrown together in a new and wholesome intimacy. There would be an end of the old aristocracy of wealth or seniority, a breaking -down of the barriers raised by an unhealthy, if time-honoured, tradition. The merits of the new proposals were beyond challenge ; they were, indeed, the logical out- come of the preceptorial system, and without them that admirable reform could not come to full fruition. In June 1907 twenty-four of the twenty- seven trustees (two being absent and one dis- sentient) gave them their cordial approval. A few weeks later the scheme, thus endorsed, was made public in the university, to be greeted with opposition immediate and intense. The clubs, whose existence was directly threatened (though the hostel scheme was prompted in the first instance by recognition of its own inherent ad- vantages), set the note of the outcry. Alumni of PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 39 every generation — once wealthy club members, now substantial financial supporters of the univer- sity — rallied to the support of menaced privilege. Warnings of the withdrawal of subscriptions rained in on the Board. The trustees quailed, then yielded, before the storm. In October they called on the President to withdraw his proposals. Dr. Wilson bowed, to force majeure. He had run his first tilt against the power of the dollar — and the dollar had won. A second venture in the same quixotic crusade lay not far ahead. During Dr. Wilson's term of office the proposal to establish a graduate school at Princeton, where facilities for post- graduate work were almost, non-existent, had taken definite shape. Dr. Andrew West, desig- nated Dean of the Graduate School before the school was in actual being', had drawn up a report embodying his personal views as to its character and constitution. These had been cir- culated, but the matter rested in abeyance for lack of funds, till at the end of 1906 a legacy of $250,000 (under the will of a Mrs. Swann), coupled with the quite acceptable condition that the new college should be built on the campus as an integral part of the university, enabled the drafting of the plans to be put in hand in earnest. Much time was spent in deliberation and dis- cussion, and in 1909, before building had actually been begun, the university received from a Mr. W. C. Proctor, of Cincinnati, an offer of $500,000, contingent on the raising of a like sum by subscription. That was not the only 40 PRESIDENT WILSON condition attached, nor the most stringent. Prac- tically the whole of the second half -million dollars was, in fact, quickly obtained. Unfortunately, the donor stipulated further that the college should be modelled in detail on the plans formulated by Dean West, and that it should be located, not on the chosen site, but in a part of the town remote from the existing university buildings. An issue involving something far more funda- mental than individual taste and preference was directly raised. Dr. Wilson realized immediately how vital a principle was at stake. Was the management of Princeton to rest with those — the President, the faculty, and the trustees — to whom its destinies were committed as perpetual executors of the founders and benefactors of the university ? Or was the right of interference and veto to be purchasable by any donor whose ofifer ran into the necessary number of thousands ?. The choice was between mind and money as the governing factor. That in itself would have been decisive, even if Dean West's plans and Mr. Proctor's proposed site had been acceptable to President and trustees. And, as it happened, they were not. What the Dean had planned, and the donor approved, was an ornate and luxurious school, severed both in situation and in mental atmosphere from the rest of Princeton, where an intellectual aristocracy would form an aloof and exclusive society, intent before all things on its own prosperity. The graduate school of Dr. Wilson's ideal was to be an integral part of Princeton. The men who PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON 41 remained, or who came from other colleges, to follow the higher studies for which provision would be made, were to have as essential a place in Princeton society as freshman and sophomore, junior and senior. Their work would be an in- centive to the undergraduates in embodying an ideal of academic attainment above the level of the ordinary A.B. or B.Litt. degtee, and their society would effectually stimulate the develop- ment of that intellectual companionship which the preceptorial system was designed, and successfully designed, to generate. The President stood unwavering by a principle it would be fatal to betray. It was money or mind. " When the country is looking to us as men who prefer ideas even to money, are we going," he asked, " to withdraw and say, ' After all, we find we were mistaken : we prefer money to ideas ' ? " The trustees were in perplexity, for there was much division of opinion among the alumni. Their decision rested in doubt, but a committee of their number appointed to consider the situation advised against accepting the gift if with it they must accept the conditions originally attached. The offer was thereupon withdrawn. Princeton had rejected a benefaction of half a million, with the certainty of another half -million to supplement it. The decision was taken to pro- ceed with the graduate school on the modest scale first contemplated under the old quarter - million Swann bequest. The second tilt with the dollar was to all appearance over, leaving the President this time victor of the field. A g*reat :42 PRESIDENT WILSON principle had been vindicated, and Princeton was immeasurably the richer for its sacrifice. Never had a great contest a more ironical climax. Before the mingled clamour of approval and criticism had died a\vay an aged Princeton alumnus, Isaac Wyman, died, leaving in his will over three million dloHats, bequeathed to the Graduate College at Princeton, Dean West and another being nominated as trustees of the bequest. The Dean and his plans had triumphed. The endowment from the grave was conclusive. Simul- taneously the Proctor offer was renewed — with its conditions. The trustees, always hesitant, withdrew all opposition. In June 1910 the gift was accepted. Dr. Wilson recognized defeat. The academic year ended a week later, and three months' vacation gave him time to consider his future action. External influences contributed to precipitate a decision. On September 15th the Democratic State Convention nominated Dr. Woodrow Wilson as Governor of New Jersey. The same month he resigned the Presidency of Princeton. He laid down his office under the shadow of defeat, but he left behind him a record of salutary and permanent reform such as no one of his predecessors had ever established. CHAPTER III GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY You have given the people of this country so many persons to select for office that they have not time to select them, and have to leave it to professionals — that is to say, the professional politicians, which, reduced to its simplest term, is the boss of the district. When you vote the Republican or Democratic ticket, you either vote for the names selected by one machine or the names selected by the other machine. . . . The remedy is contained in one word, simplification. Simplify your processes, and you will begin to control; complicate them, and you will get farther and farther away from their control. Simplification ! Simplification ! Simplification ! is the task that awaits us : to reduce the number of persons voted for to the absolute workable minimum — knowing whom you have selected, knowing whom you have trusted, and having so few persons to watch that you can watch them. That is the way we are going to get popular control back in this country, and that is the only way we are going to get popular control back. Address to ike Civic League of St. Lotus, March 1909. The position of State Governor in the United States has no true analogy in English political life. The forty-eight States differ from a County in England, a Department in France, and a Government in Russia, in that their powers are original, not devolved. The thirteen colonies that banded together in 1775 to fight the War of Independence became in 1783, when the victory had been won, thirteen sovereign States, and when in 1787 the Constitution of the United States 43 44 PRESIDENT WILSON was formulated, it conferred on the Federal Government only such powers as the individual States had chosen voluntarily to surrendci". These original thirteen States determined by their pre- cedent the position of the thirty-five subsequently admitted into the Union, the governing factor in their relation to the Federal Government being the principle that any powers not expressly conferred on the latter by the Constitution remain in the hands of the State. The States themselves differ in the details of their institutions, but under the Constitution all must maintain a Republican form of government, which is invariably represented by a Governor and two Houses of Legislature, a Senate and an Assembly. In its main features, therefore, the State Government is a replica in little of the Federal, the Governor corresponding to the Presi- dent, and the two branches of the legislature to the Senate and House of Representatives at Washington. The Governor, unlike the bearer of that title in a British colony, is not appointed by the central Government, but elected by the voters of the State, Washington having no concern with or control over him unless he should come into collision with the Constitution or a Federal law. While each State has its own Constitution, the position of the Governor is substantially the same in all. He holds office in some cases for two years, in some for three or four. His salary varies from as low as 2,500 dollars (Vermont) to as high as 12,000 (Illinois). In New Jersey the GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 45 term is three years and the salary 10,000 dollars. The Governor is the chief executive of the State, as the President is of the Union, and he enjoys the same power of veto over legislation. He has extensive powers of appointment, which he regularly exercises in favour of his political sup- porters, and limited powers of removal. Since he sits in neither of the two Houses of Legislature, and addresses them only in messages delivered annually or on special occasions, his direct in- fluence over legislation is usually comparatively small. His real power depends on his personality. A forceful Governor, like a forceful President, can find means of initiating extensive programmes, as men like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson have demonstrated in both capacities. It was as candidate for an ofifice involving such responsibilities that Mr. Wilson was nominated at the New Jersey State Convention in September 19 10, the actual election falling in the following November. The choice of the President of Princeton as candidate for the highest executive office in the State, and Mr. Wilson's acceptance of the invitation thus extended, were unexpected, but not intrinsically remarkable, events. It has already been seen that the idea of a public career, if circumstances should so shape themselves, had taken an early hold on the future President's mind, and during his later years at Princeton he had been in much request as a speaker outside the borders both of the university and of the State. He addressed Chambers of Commerce on the control of public companies, Bar Associations on 46 {PRESIDENT WILSON the constitutions and functions of government, Bankers' Associations on financial topics, Civic Leagues on electoral and administrative reform, and educational gatherings of every variety on subjects with which his position at Princeton par- ticularly qualified him to deal. He was known as a radical and a democrat, and — what is not neces- sarily implied by the latter term — a. Democrat in the political sense. But if Mr. Wilson's entry into active political life was not in itself remarkable, there were certain features connected with his adoption that did make both the nomination and the acceptance surprising. Nothing could be more antagonistic to Mr. Wilson's political ideals than the principles, if principles they could be called, that governed the tactics of the Democratic (and equally of the Republican) Party in New Jersey ; and nothing was calculated to be more fatal to the aims of the professional politicians than the election of the candidate of their choice. But the Democrats wanted office at any cost. They had not a man who could carry the Governorship on his own or the party's merits. Woodrow Wilson could carry it, and the Democratic caucus had little doubt that once they had him elected they could bend him to their purposes, as they bent every holder of public office from Governor to sanitary trustee. That accounts for the party's side of the transac- tion. Mr. Wilson's acceptance is easier to explain. He had lived for twenty years in New Jersey. He had no illusions on the condition of the public administration, dominated as it had been for a GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 47 generation by one or other of two corrupt and unprincipled party gangs, working always in ostensible rivalry, though often in secret collu- sion. Never did an American State stand in greater need of a " clean up," and if Wilson were invested with the powers that would enable him to carry out that salutary process, he was not the man to shrink from applying' them. He warned his supporters that they were running a man who went into politics with his hands free and un- pledged to party bosses. They accepted his con- ditions, conscious of the value of a candidate of Dr. Wilson's personality and character to a party of damaged reputation, and privately satisfied that his assertion of political independence was worth" exactly as much as the protestations of a dozen self-styled independents in the past. The political atmosphere into which the univer- sity president plunged when he motored from Princeton to Trenton to make his speech of acceptance in September 1910 could hardly be paralleled in English public life. Democracy in America is theoretically unfettered. Every man votes as he will, and the successful candidate represents the free and spontaneous choice of a majority (or at least a " plurality ") of the electors. In actual practice the whole system of government, municipal. State, and Federal, tends to fall into the hands of a narrow party caucus, always astute, often unscrupulous, some- times corrupt, basing its power on an evil tradition which justifies the doctrine of " the spoils to th'e victor," and enables the party leader to bind his 48 PRESIDENT WILSON followers to him by the actual enjoyment or the confident hope of the countless official appoint- ments to which he holds the patronage. When a change of Administration in the Union, the State, or the city means the removal of an army of officials, who in this country would be permanent national or municipal servants, and the substitu- tion of another army appointed by the victors at the polls, it is quixotic to hope that political life can be clean. As it is, the domination of the " machine," with its rings and bosses, operates to enthrone material interests in politics and reduce the conscientious and independent elector to impo- tence. Nominations of candidates are made, not by the rank and file of the party direct, but by delegates appointed usually at a carefully packed meeting, at which the party managers rarely have any difficulty in securing the adoption of a list prepared in caucus beforehand and put to the meeting as a whole. At the actual election the free and independent voter, presented with a formidable list of rival candidates for Federal, State, and local office (a New York ballot sheet in the 1 9 1 6 election measured eight feet in length), backs his party ticket solid, with dis- ciplined and undiscriminating loyalty to the machine . Legislators thus elected are under a perpetual obligation to consolidate their own and their party's position by devoting themselves con- sistently to the conciliation of individuals and corporations (public companies) whose goodwill is a party asset. The prevalence of actual cor- GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 49 ruption in American public life is probably less than Americans themselves sometimes suggest, but the relations between individual members of a State Senate or Assembly and a railroad appre- hensive of regulative legislation, a light or power company playing for the grant of a monopoly, or a contractor angling for the supply of goods to a public institution, are notoriously equivocal. The art of reciprocal back-scratching is nowhere more scientifically developed than in American State politics. In modification of these strictures it should be added that the standard of political purity is much higher in some States than in others, and that, taking the Union as a whole, the level has been substantially raised in the last twenty years. Many States, by making a "direct primary" (i.e. the choice of party candidates by a direct vote of the rank and file of the party, instead of by a packed delegation) statutory, have done a good deal to weaken the boss and the party machine. New Jersey had adopted the direct primary for certain ofiices before the date of Dr. Wilson's candidature, but in most respects State politics were still at the mercy of the rival bosses and their subservient and interested followers. The Republicans had held the Governorship for fourteen years, and the Democratic boss, ex -Senator James Smith (who was on such terms with the head of the rival machine as to secure a substantial share of the pickings), was perfectly conscious, not merely that the position could only be won for his party by a candidate of Dr. Wilson's calibre, but that eVen 4 50 PRESIDENT WILSON so the success of the candidature would largely depend on the extent to which the party nominee remained dissociated from the traditions of the party machine and relied for his appeal on the force of his own personality. Dr. Wilson's speech of acceptance, after his nomination as candidate had been carried on the first ballot (i.e. by a clear majority over the com- bined votes of rival candidates) in the Democratic State Convention, defined his attitude on the political issues then immediately pending. He touched on six questions in particular, three re- garded as of primary and three as of secondary importance : reorganization and economy in administration ; the equalization of taxation; the control of corporations ; employers' liability ; corrupt practices at elections ; and conservation of natural resources for the good of the common- wealth. In reply to questions he declared himself resolutely opposed to the boss system, and deter- mined to break it by promoting the election to office of men who shared his views. After seven weeks spent in the necessary speech -making throughout the State, Mr. Wilson was, on November 8th, elected Governor of New Jersey with a plurality of nearly fifty thousand votes. At the Presidential election three years before the Republican plurality had been over eighty thousand. The elections for Senate and Assembly gave the Democrats control of the latter, with a majority on a joint ballot of the two chambers, but the Republicans retained command of the Senate. The actual figures were : Senate, GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 51 Republican by 1 2 to 9 ; Assembly, Democratic by 42 to 18. The new Governor's principles were early put to the test. The Democratic boss, James Smith, had represented New Jersey in the Senate of the United States, and meant to represent it again whenever there was a prospect of a Democratic majority in the two houses of the State Legislature, with whom the actual election to the Senate at Washington rested. Of that Mr. Wilson was well aware, and having his own opinion of the boss's political record, he had made it a condition of his acceptance of the candidature for the Governorship that Mr. Smith should not run on the sam^e ticket as candidate for the Senate. Mr. Smith agreed, and at the primary at which the party candidates for the various offices were appointed the popular choice of the Democrats for the Senatorship fell on one James E. Martine. Mr. Martine having thus become the official party nominee, it was certain that if the forthcoming elections should yield a Democratic majority in the State Legislature the State Legislature would send Mr. Martine to Washington. The result of the poll did, as has been seen, yield a joint Democratic majority of twenty-one in the two houses, owing largely to the advantage accruing to Democratic candidates from associa- tion on the same ticket with so strong a nominee for the Governorship as Dr. Wilson. When this became clear Mr. James Smith's ideas on the Senatorship rapidly changed. His health, which he had advanced as a guarantee of his good faith 52 PRESIDENT WILSON when he assured Mr. Wilson he was not a candi- date for Washington, suddenly improved. He decided, in short, that when the Legislature went through the formality of electing a United States Senator the Democratic majority should vote, not for Martine, the choice of the people, but for Smithy the choice of Smith. Whatever term may be applicable to sharp practice of this kind, the manoeuvre was not definitely unconstitutional, and there seemed no reason to suppose that a party boss of the power of ex -Senator Smith would find it difficult to enforce his will. A reason, however, there was, incarnated in the resolute personality of the new Governor, When the would-be Senator first mentioned his intention to Dr. Wilson the latter was amazed at the proposal, and before dismissing the subject, as he quickly did, entered an emphatic protest against so flagrant a disregard of the popular decision. Mr. Smith, none the less, proceeded with his candidature. Public opinion was sharply divided, less on the ethics of the proceeding than on the power of the machine to carry its man through, and all sections looked to the Governor for a lead. Dr. Wilson gave Smith to understand that unless a written assurance of his withdrawal was forthcoming within forty -eight hours he would denounce him publicly. The hour fixed brought no message, and the next day's papers contained a plain and emphatic statement of the Governor's views on the Senatorship question. Nor did he stop at a newspaper statement. Before the Legis- lature met he had addressed crowded public m«et- GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 53 ings in the chief cities of the State, insisting, not on the personal qualifications of Martine against Smith, but on the right of the people to have its decision carried out. When the Houses voted Martine was sent to Washington ; Smith was beaten out of the field. It is note- worthy that where the average Governor in such a case would have confined himself to caucusing with the legislators Mr. Wilson went direct to the people. His action was in complete con- sonance with th^ doctrine he enunciated in the course of this particular campaign : " Absolute good faith in dealing with the people, an un- hesitating fidelity to every principle avowed, is the highest law of political morafity under a constitutional government . ' ' This initial and signal victory over the political machine was a fitting prelude to an administration that stamped the public life of New Jersey with the personality of its Governor to a degree unprecedented in its history. The traditional severance between executive and legislative functions in the Constitution both of the Union and of the several States carries with it the inherent defect of leaving the legislature in either case comparatively leaderless. The President and his Ministers cannot sit in Con- gress ; the Governor cannot sit in the State Legislature. Consequently the man supremely responsible for administering the law^ and there- fore supremely alive to the need for legislative changes and reforms, has no direct means of laying his view before the legislative body except 54 PRESIDENT WILSON through the ineffective medium of an occasional personal message, usually transmitted in writing. Constructive leadership under such conditions is almost — ^though not, as Mr. Wilson and a few- other Governors have shown, entirely — impossible. Congress at Washington and the Legislatures in the State capitals tend alike to be controlled by a party caucus and dominated by gtoups repre- senting various material interests, and directly susceptible to the vigorous lobbying of individuals and corporations intent on securing some profit- able concession or effecting the defeat of regu- lative and restrictive legislation. Of these dangers Mr. Wilson was acutely con- scious. As far back as 1897, when he was still a Princeton professor, he had expressed his con- viction in an address to the Virginia State Bar Association that " successful Governments have never been conducted safely in the midst of com- plex and critical affairs, except when guided by those who were responsible for carrying* out and bringing to an issue the measures they proposed ; and the separation of the right to plan from the duty to execute has always led to blundering and inefficiency." That conviction did not ^row weaker as the speaker's experience matured, and when he found himself Governor of a State numbering two and a half million citizens he found the problem confronting him in a very concrete form. Since a revolutionary recasting of the State Constitution was not to be considered, it remained to make the best of the system as it stood. In that purpose the Governor's one asset GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 55 was his own force of character and indifference to tradition. To these quaHties was soon added his victory in the matter of the Senatorship, a success that was manifestly the earnest of further success. While he conceived himself, and not a political boss, to be the rightful leader of his party in the State, he regarded himself in almost equal degree as the representative of the whole electorate — as in his executive capacity he constitutionally was — and he had no intention of allowing party antagonisms to militate against either adminis- trative or legislative efficiency. By 1910 the Progressive, or radical, section of the Republican Party was making itself felt throughout the Union, and Governor Wilson early scandalized the more hidebound of his supporters by taking counsel with the leaders of the New Jersey Progressives, whose support he had strong hope of enlisting for liis programme of social reform. What that programme was had been stated in the Governor's speech of acceptance. Its chief heads may profitably be recalled, for comparison with the actual legislative record registered during Mr. Wilson's first year of office. They concerned reorganization and economy in administration ; the equalization of taxation ; the control of cor- porations ; employers' liability; corrupt practices at elections ; and conservation. Redemption of the pledges that constituted this formidable plat- form began early in the session of 1911, with a measure introducing the system of the direct primary (i.e. a direct popular vote as opposed to the traditional series of packed delegations and 5 6 PRESIDENT WILSON caucuses) for the nomination of the party candi- dates for every public office, from President of the United States down to the humblest local official. The whole machinery of party nomina- tion would, under the terms of the Geran Bill (the measure bore the name of the Assemblyman who introduced it), be as much under the control and direction of the State as the actual election itself. The passage of such a measure appeared to spell the inevitable doom of party bosses and machine rule ; and so in a measure it did_, though in most electoral areas politicians adept at wire-pulling have revealed sufficient fertility of resource to find means for retaining, even under the Geran Act, something of their threatened domination. Such a Bill was assured of an organized and desperate opposition. Prophets of established reputation foretold a debdcle for the Governor. A con- ference of dissentient Democrats and Republicans was called to concert the defeat of the measure. Governor Wilson invited himself to the conference and addressed it for four hours. He did not kill the opposition, but he detached from it every legislator responsive to the appeal of political morality and democratic principle. The Geran Bill went through the Assembly by what, for so bitterly contested a measure, was almost a luxurious majority. In the Senate, where its rejection was counted as certain, it had a passage of unruffled tranquiUity. The first undertaking in the platform programme was redeemed. The further measures of the session of 1 9 1 1 need not be considered in intimate detail. A GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 57 Corrupt Practices Act required the publication of election expenses ; prohibited contributions by corporations to party funds ; forbade betting on results and treating by candidates ; and imposed on candidates a statutory maximum of expendi- ture. Together with the Geran Act, the measure went far towards transforming the political atmosphere of New Jersey. The drafting of an Employers' Liability Bill presented some difficulties, owing to recent legal decisions in another State raising doubts as to the constitutionality of a compulsory measure on the English model. The New Jersey Bill, therefore, was so drawn as to impose liability on the employer in the absence of a specific agreement to the contrary between master and man. In actual working practically no advantage has been taken of the loophole thus offered for contracting out. The Act is in almost universal application throughout tke State, and has been quoted by high legal authorities as a model for other State legislatures. There remained the re|;ulation of corporations. State and municipal trading has made little head- way in America, most of the public services which in this country are under popular ownership and direction being discharged under contract by private corporations. Hence the ceaseless stream of scheming, lobbying, and intriguing by gas companies, power companies, street -car com- panies, railroads, road -cleaning contractors, and the like, by which legislators, municipal, State, and Federalj in America are exposed to perpetual SS PRESIDENT WILSON temptation to corruption of varying degree. That is not the only evil effect of the system. Fran- chises, or contracts, conferred by the Legislature may be paid for directly by secret commissions to the members of a Senate or Assembly, or in- directly by contributions to party funds (very often to the funds of both parties simultaneously), and that outlay is possible largely because the successful company can always recoup itself in enhanced charges to the consumer. On both grounds Governor Wilson was abund- antly justified in his endeavour to put the relations of legislators and corporations on a different footing. The first measure directed to that end was a Public Utilities Bill, establishing a Public Utilities Commission such as was created about the same time in a number of other States. The purpose of the commissions is, as an x^merican constitutional writer ' succinctly puts it, " to divorce all corporate regulation from politics by taking it out of the hands of the Legislature and placing it in the control of a small adminis- trative body." Such a commission, consisting usually of not more than four members, has jurisdiction over water, gas, telephone, tramway, railway, lighting, and similar companies, with power to regulate their operations and control their charges, having regard equally to the interests of the consumer and of the company shareholder, and to investigate their finances and supervise new issues of capital. The institution of a Public Utilities Commis- • Young, The Neiu American Government and its Work, chap, xviii. GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 59 sion in New Jersey was one of the chief products of the first legislative session of Dr. Wilson's Governorship. Its effect has been all that was looked for in the purification of public life and the protection of the interest of the consumer. With the Public Utilities Bill was associated a similar measure providing for the reform of municipal administration by the adoption of the commission form of city government. That system involves the supersession of the municipal council of the old type, whose members are elected on party lines, and subject to the constant solici- tations of corporations and their agents, in favour of a small commission, presided over by a salaried mayor, which administers all the affairs of the city, often acquiring and running by direct labour such necessary enterprises as waterworks and electric plant. The commissioners are elected for a two or three year term by a direct popular vote, which appears in most cases to have been successfully emancipated from party influences. The commission system, which the 1 9 1 1 Act made voluntary, not mandatory, was in 1 9 1 5 in operation in twenty-four New Jersey cities, in- cluding Atlantic City, Jersey City, Trenton, and Hoboken. Only three States of the Union had a larger number of municipalities so governed. The measures so far enumerated do not com- prise the whole harvest of 191 i, and the harvest of 191 I does not comprise the whole yield of Mr. Wilson's Governorship ; but between the close of that session and his resignation on becoming President of the United States in 19 13, 6o PRESIDENT WILSON his power of legislative initiative and direction at Trenton was seriously curtailed. The elections to the Senate and Assembly in November 1 9 1 1 resulted in a Republican victory, and when the Governor met the new Legislature in March 1 9 1 2 he found his political opponents in command. The handicap was less serious than it would have been under normal conditions. Mr. Wilson had never exaggerated party distinctions, and he had made it a regular practice to consult as freely with individual Republicans as with individual Democrats. None the less his influence over the houses was inevitably less than in the previous year, and in the remaining twelve months of his Governorship the legislative output fell off. That was not necessarily an evil. The main reforms Dr. Wilson had had in view were already effected, and, in any case, efficient administration was as important as sound legislation. The chief measure of 1 9 1 2, an attempt to reorganize the various State boards and commissions on a basis of economy and efficiency, was largely vitiated by the Legislature, but in the following year the Governor's last official message, an appeal for the further regulation of corporations, led directly to the formulation and passage into law of the series of Bills known as the Seven Sisters, directed to the protection of the public from exploitation by trusts and combinations, and of shareholders from the manipulation and watering of stock. It is too soon to decide how far the laws have carried out the purpose of their framer. He himself did not remain at Trenton long enough GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 6i to give them his official assent. By the time it fell to his successor to put his name to the Bills Dr. Woodrow Wilson was in residence at the White House as President of the United States. His record as Governor tells its own story. For comment it is sufficient to quote three brief but characteristic verdicts, published during his term of office, the first from a Canadian newspaper, the second from an American, the third from a British . " Dr. Wilson's five moaths' record " (written in 191 I ) "as Governor of New Jersey have shown that he is an idealist who can down the politicians and get results." " He is a giant, who will go far in American politics." " To read Mr. Wilson's speeches, to study his acts, to talk with the man himself, is to be filled with a new hope for American politics. . . . There was [in his campaign speeches] none of the usual party claptrap and vituperation, no effort to keep alive meaningless party lines or tradi- tions, no dealing in sonorous generalities. From first to last Mr. Wilson appealed to reason and to conscience." More weighty and authoritative judgments on the Governor of New Jersey could be quoted,' but ' It is worth while appending here an extract of some length from a speech of Mr. Wilson's, delivered during the Presidential campaign of 1912, while he was still Governor of New Jersey : — " Let me tell the story of the emancipation of one State — New Jersey. It has surprised the people of the United States to find New Jersey at the front in enterprises of reform. I, who have lived in New Jersey the greater part of my mature life, know that there is 62 PRESIDENT WILSON these will suffice. And out of the Governor the President was born. no State in the Union which, so far as the hearts and intelligence of its people are concerned, has more earnestly desired reform than has New Jersey. There are men who have been prominent in the affairs of the State who again and again advocated, with all the earnestness that was in them, the things that we have at last been able to do. There are men in New Jersey who have spent some ot the best energies of their lives in trying to win elections in order to get the support of t'.ie citizens of New Jersey for programmes of reform. ' ' The people had voted or such things very often before the autumn of 1910, but the interesting thing is that nothing happened. They were demanding the benefit of remedial measures such as had been passed in every progressive State of the Union, measures which had proved not only that they did not upset the life of the communities to which they were applied, but that they quickened every force and bettered every condition in those communities. But the people of New Jersey could not get them, and there had come upon them a certain pessimistic despair. I used to meet men who shrugged their shoulders and said : ' What difference does it make how we vote ? Nothing ever results from our votes.' The force that is behind the new party that has recently been formed, the so-called ' Progressive Party,' is a force of discontent with the old parties of the United States. It is the feeling that men have gone into blind alleys often enough, and that somehow there must be found an open road through which men may pass to some purpose. " In the year 1910 there came a day when the people of New Jersey took heart to believe that something could be accomplished. I had no merit as a candidate for Governor, except that I said what I really thought, and the compliment that the people paid me was in believing that I meant what I said. Unless they had believed in the Governor whom they then elected, unless they had trusted him deeply and altogether, he could have done absolutely nothing. The force of the public men of a nation lies in the faith and the backing of the people of the country, rather than in any gifts of their own. In proportion as you trust them, in proportion as you back them up, in proportion as you lend them your strength, are they strong. The things that have happened in New Jersey since 1910 have happened because the seed was planted in this fine fertile soil of confidence, of trust, of renewed hope. "The moment the forces in New Jersey that had resisted reform realized that the people were backing new men who meant what they GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 63 had said, they realized that they dare not resist them. It was not the personal force of the new officials ; it was the moral strength of their backing that accomplished the extraordinary result. "And what was accomplished? Mere justice to classes that had not been treated justly before. Every schoolboy in the State of New Jersey, if he cared to look into the matter, could comprehend the fact that the laws applying to labouring-men with respect of compensation when they were hurt in their various employments had originated at a time when society was organized very differently from the way in which it is organized now, and that because the law had not been changed, the courts were obliged to go blindly on administer- ng laws which were cruelly unsuitable to existing conditions, so that it was practically impossible for the working-men of New Jersey to get justice from the courts ; the legislature of the commonwealth had not come to their assistance with the necessary legislation. No- body seriously debated the circumstances ; everybody knew that the law was antiquated and impossible; everybody knew that justice waited to be done. Very well, then, why wasn't it done? " There was another thing that we wanted to do: We wanted to regulate our public service corporations so that we could get the proper service for them, and on reasonable terms. That had been done elsewhere, and where it had been done it had proved just as much for the benefit of the corporations themselves as for the benefit of the people. Of course it was somewhat difficult to convince the corporations. It happened that one of the men who knew the least about the subject was the president of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. I have heard speeches from that gentleman that exhibited a total lack of acquaintance with the circumstances of our times. I have never known ignorance so complete in its detail ; and, being a man of force and ignorance, he naturally set all his energy to resist the things that he did not comprehend. " I am not interested in questioning the motives oi men in such positions. I am only sorry that they don't know more. If they would only join the procession they would find themselves benefited by the healthful exercise, which, for one thing, would renew within them the capacity to learn which I hope they possessed when they were younger. We were not trying to do anything novel in New Jersey in regulating the Public Service Corporation ; we were simply trying to adopt there a tested measure of public justice. We adopted it. Has anybody gone bankrupt since ? Does anybody now doubt that it was just as much for the benefit of the Public Service Corpora- tion as for the people of the State ? " Then there was another thing that we modestly desired : We wanted fair elections ; we did not want candidates to buy themselves 64 PRESIDENT WILSON into oftice. That seemed reasonable. So we adopted a law, unique in one particular, namely : that if you bought an office, you didn't get it. I admit that that is contrary to all commercial principles, but I think it is pretty good political doctrine. It is all very well to put a man in jail for buying an office, but it is very much better, besides putting him in jail, to show him that if he has paid out a single dollar for that office, he does not get it, though a huge majority voted for him. We reversed the laws of trade ; when you buy something in politics in New Jersey, you do not get it. It seemed to us that that was the best way of discouraging improper political argument. If your money does not produce the goods, then you are not tempted to spend your money. "We adopted a Corrupt Practices Act, the reasonable foundation of which no man could question, and an Election Act, which every man predicted was not going to work, but which did work — to the emancipation of the voters of New Jersey. "All these things are now commonplaces with us. We like the laws that we have passed, and no man ventures to suggest any material change in them. Why didn't we get them long ago ? What hindered us ? Why, we had a closed Government ; not an open Government. It did not belong to us. It was managed by little groups of men whose names we know, but whom somehow we didn't seem able to dislodge. When we elected men pledged to dislodge them, they only went into partnership with them. When the people had taken over control of the Government, a curious change was wrought in the souls of a great many men ; a sudden moral awakening took place, and we simply could not find culprits against whom to bring indict- ments : it was like a Sunday School the way they obeyed the laws" ( The New Freedom y chap. x). CHAPTER IV THE 1912 ELECTION What the country will demand of the candidate will be, not that he be an astute politician, skilled and practised in affairs, but that he be a man such as it can trust, in character, in intention, in know- ledge of its needs, in perception of the best means by which those needs can be met, in capacity to prevail by reason of his own weight and integrity. — Constitutional Government in U.S.A. (1908). Dr. Woodrow Wilson was not the obvious Democratic candidate in 191 2. That title could' more properly be claimed by Mr. W. J. Bryan, who had three times carried the party standard to defeat, in 1896, 1900, and 1908 ; or by Mr. Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Repre- sentatives. But neither was Dr. Wilson an eleventh -hour choice. Even before his election as Governor of New Jersey discerning politicians had written him down as a future candidate for the highest office in the Union. Some of them had given open expression to their predictions. As far back as 1906, when Mr. Wilson was hardly half way throug'h his eight years' Presi- dency at Princeton, Colonel George Harvey, editor then of Harper's Weekly and now of the North American Review, had associated his name with the Presidency of the United States, referring to him as " a man combining the activities of the 5 66 PRESIDENT WILSON present with the sobering influences of the past," and as uniting in his personality " the finest instinct of true statesmanship as the effect of his early environment, and the no less valuable capacity for practical application achieved through subsequent endeavours in another field." ' Five years later, in March 191 1, the same authority, in discussing the rift in the Democratic Party, and the improbability of the election of Mr. Bryan_, again proposed as the ideal candidate " Woodrow Wilson, the highly Americanized Scotch -Irishman, descended from Ohio, born in Virginia, developed in Maryland, married in Georgia, and now deliver- ing from bondage that faithful old Democratic Commonwealth, the State of New Jersey." ^ If the earlier appreciation was in advance of contemporary party opinion, the latter faithfully reflected it. The election of Mr. Wilson to the Governorship of New Jersey, and the vigour of his administration from the day of his assumption of office, brought his personality under searching public scrutiny, and a large section of the Demo- cratic Party were already convinced that in the New Jersey Governor they had found the pre- ordained candidate for an election which promised, owing to the Republican split, to introduce to the White House the second Democratic President since the Civil War. In the same year, 191 1, Mr. Wilson, who took the position that he was justified neither in seeking nor in declining the weighty responsibilities of Presidential office, con- ' Address to Lotos Club of New York, February 1906. ' Address to Hibernian Society of SaY3.nn3.h, G» THE 19 1 2 ELECTION 6-j sented to address a series of meetings through the Middle and Far West, and in January 19 12, by a powerful speech delivered at the Jackson Day banquet at Washington in the presence of members of the Democratic National Committee, confirmed the hold he had already established on a growing section of the party throughout the Union. The support accorded to the prospective candidate was essentially popular and spontaneous. He had no command over the national party machine. A campaign organization was estab- lished in his interest by one of his old Princeton pupils, Mr. William F. Mc Combs, of New York, subsequently Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and at the National Convention at Baltimore in June 1912 the New Jersey deleg'a- tion brought forward the name of their State Governor for President . For what principles did the Democratic Party stand in national politics in 1 9 1 2 ? The question cannot be answered without some reference to the history of party divisions in America. The two great opposing sections date back under different names to the first administration of the Republic. The antagonistic forces in Washington's Cabinet were represented by Hamilton and Jefferson, the one standing for the concentration of power in the hands of the central Government, the other for a jealous guardianship of the rights of the individual States. Hamilton, with Washington giving him such tacit support as his high position permitted, headed the Federalists, Jefferson the party at first known as Democratic -Republicans, 68 PRESIDENT WILSON then as Republicans, and for the last ninety years as Democrats. The Federalists were in power for the first three Presidential terms (i 789-1801), but with Jefferson's election in 1800 a long term of Republican success at the polls began. Federalism had disappeared from American politics by about 1 8 1 5, and for the next ten or twelve years (the " Era of Good Feeling ") a single party held the field. Out of the con- troversies that marked John Quincy Adams's election in 1824 a new grouping arose, and Andrew Jackson was elected for the first of his two terms in 1828 as a Democrat, the opposition, headed by Henry Clay, acquiring the name of Whig. Whigs and Democrats divided office and spoils till the middle fifties, when attempts to hedge on the slavery question worked the disso- lution of the Whigs. Their traditions were bequeathed to the great party that opposes the Democrats to-day. Fremont ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency as a Republican in 1856 and Lincoln successfully in i860. Since that day there has been no new party alignment, despite periodic threats of secession and disintegration in either camp. While party nomenclature has changed, the broad lines of division have been in the main preserved. The two sections may with rough accuracy be described as apostles of centripetal and apostles of centrifugal action ; Federalists and States Rights men ; the party of Order and the party of Liberty ; loose construc- tionists (of the terms of the Constitution) and THE 191 2 ELECTION 69 strict constructionists ; conservatives and radicals ; but always with the proviso that distinctions valid over a period of generations may be found to have little application to the situation existing at particular moments. In recent years the demarcation has become increasingly indetermi- nate, and the only generalization on which it would be safe to venture is that of the parties of the twentieth century the Republicans stand, in principle at least, for a strong central Govern- ment and a high protective tariff ; the Democrats for the rights of the individual State and a tariff for revenue only. It may perhaps be added that Republicans are, on the whole, more favourably disposed than Democrats towards an Imperialist policy, a question that has become more imme- diate since the acquisition by America of overseas dominions as a consequence of the war with Spain. The Democratic Party met in its National Con- vention at Baltimore in 19 1 2 uncommitted to any definite constructive policy. It had been so long in a minority that opposition had almost come to be regarded as its main function. The contro- versy on the free coinage of silver had receded into the background, and on the tariff question the attitude of the party was so fixed by tradition that no new issue arose. The Democrats, like the Republicans, though in a less marked degree, were divided into conservatives and radicals, the latter represented by Mr. W. J. Bryan, of Nebraska, who had run unsuccessfully for the Presidency against McKinley in 1896 and 1900 and against Taft in 1908. The "platform" 70 PRESIDENT WILSON adopted on July 2nd was calculated to consolidate the support of all sections of the party. It called, inter alia, for downward revision of the tariff ; anti-trust legislation ; the institution of Presi- dential primaries (i.e. the expression by each voter in the party of his personal preferenqe instead of the existing nominations by conven- tions of delegates) ; a federal income-tax; pub- licity of campaign contributions ; restriction of a President's tenure to a single term ; rural credits ; free passage through the Panama Canal for coastwise shipping ; conservation of national resources ; independence for the Philippines " as soon as a stable Government can be established." A Party Convention in America is an institution siii generis. Its main business is to formulate a platform and adopt a candidate. It is composed of a specified number of delegates from each State, and one of the first duties of the Committee on Credentials, appointed at the beginning of the Convention, is to scrutinize the claims of the rival delegations in cases where a party division in a State has resulted in the dispatch to the Convention of two sets of delegates. When those preliminaries have been settled, and extravagant speeches of nomination have been duly enunciated and elaborately applauded by each potential can- didate's supporters, the solid business of balloting is taken in hand. The first day or two devoted to that process is of little account. While there are usually three or four outstanding candidates, on one of whom the final choice is certain to fall. THE 1 91 2 ELECTION 71 every Convention produces a crowd of secondary runners, most of them " favourite sons," men prominent in local politics but unknown outside their own State. The effect of the running of a number of candidates is a wide scattering' of votes on the early ballots, making it extremely unlikely that any one of the candidates will in the first instance obtain the total necessary for election, a two -thirds majority being required in a Demo- cratic Convention and a bare majority in a Repub- lican. The voting therefore proceeds towards a decision through the gradual transference of support in the successive ballots from the candi- dates at the bottom to one of the two or three at the top, a manoeuvre stimulated by assiduous solicitation and bargaining on the part of the bosses running the candidates high on the list. At Baltimore the more prominent nominees included Governor Woodrow Wilson, of New- Jersey ; Governor Harmon, of Ohio; and Champ Clark, of Missouri, Speaker of the House of Representatives. The voting on the early ballots favoured Clark:, who ran head for some time, actually commanding a clear majority of the Con- vention (though not the necessary two -thirds) on eight separate votes. He failed to hold his position and Mr. Wilson's total was steadily rising, when Mr. Bryan, whose influence with the advanced wing of the party was great, threw his support on to Mr. Wilson's side. On the forty -sixth ballot Wilson was chosen Democratic candidate for the November contest. It must be put on solemn record that when Governor Wilson was first nomi- 72 PRESIDENT WILSON nated early in the Convention his name was cheered for one hour and fifteen minutes, as. against one hour and five minutes of applause for Mr. Champ Clark. Both candidates, however, had a less enthusiastic reception than that accorded to Mr. Br^^an in the 1908 Convention, when voices, feet, and arms saluted him for one hour and twenty -seven minutes on end. By the first week in August Mr. Wilson had in the field agiainst him the official Republican nominee, President William H. Taft, and Mr. Roosevelt, running as a Progressive. There was little prospect of Mr. Roosevelt's election. He had served practically the whole of two Presi- dential terms, and no candidate had ever so far triumphed over the fixed sentiment ag'ainst a third term as to secure himself twelve years of office. The result of the split he effected in the Repub- lican Party by detaching the radical wing and creating a new " Progressive " organization could only be to ensure Mr. Taft's defeat as well as his own. The cleavage is to be attributed to no single cause. Personality had a good deal to do with it, Mr. Taft was an able and upright President, but he inspired no enthusiasm. He had, moreover, alienated important interests by his attitude on the tariff and on Canadian Reci- procity. His predecessor and opponent with a restless and quixotic temper combined a genuine enthusiasm for social reform — provided it followed his own prescribed formulae — which gained him a considerable following among the more THE 191 2 ELECTION T2> advanced sections of the old Republican Party. The Progressive platform was a curious amalgam of the Republican and the Democratic. Mr. Taft stood on his own record as President, reinforced by a programme of trust prosecution, currency reform, conservation, and a strong' Navy. The Progressives, meeting in Convention at Chicago after both the Republicans and the Democrats, issued a voluminous statement demanding exten- sive ameliorative action by the Central Govern- ment and the fullest measure of direct popular control over election and legislation. Mr. Wilson, in his acceptance speech to the delegation that conveyed a formal intimation of his choice by the Convention, substantially en- dorsed the Convention platform (though, as his subsequent action showed, he did not hold him- self bound by it), and emphasized in particular the need of so directing the currency reform measures as to consult the interests of farmers and merchants as well as bankers, and of " setting up the rule of justice and right in respect of such matters as the tariff, control of trusts, and labour legislation." The four months intervening between the earlier Conventions and the elections at the beginning of November were devoted to the usual oratorical tours throughout the Union. Mr. Wilson's cam- paign speeches, their permanent value empha- sized by the excision of passages of purely ephemeral importance, have been preserved in the volume edited by Mr. W. B. Hale, and entitled The New Freedom. As the campaign 74 PRESIDENT WILSON ran its course it became increasingly clear that the Democratic candidate had victory in sight, though the abortive attempt of a demented Socialist to assassinate Mr. Roosevelt at Milwaukee in October gave a momentary impetus to the Progressive canvass. The procedure followed at a Presidential election is to be ascribed to the attempt of the framers of the American Constitution to place the choice of President in the hands of men of proved integrity and sober judgment, who would select the occupant of the White House under a due sense of responsibility and with minds detached from the turmoil of party politics. Accordingly the election was made indirect. The voters of each State, instead of choosing a Presi- dent, chose electoral delegates, with whom the selection of a President would rest. The number of delegates was to be equal to that of the State's representation in the Senate and House of Repre- sentatives combined. Since every State, great or small, sends two representatives to the Senate, but is represented in the House on the basis of population (from New York, which returns forty - three members, to New Mexico, which returns one), it follows that the electoral college is also chosen on what is practically a population basis. New York has forty -five electoral votes and Penn- sylvania thirty -eight, while Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and others still stand at the irreducible minimum of three. The theory of an election uninfluenced by party politics had broken down before the Republic THE 1912 ELECTION 75 had been in being for a dozen years. The Presi- dential candidates to-day — and it has been the same for generations back — ^are chosen by the Party Conventions, and though the individual citizen cannot vote for his party candidate direct, he can vote for a panel of electors pledged to the party ticket. The elections for the electoral college are conducted on purely party lines. In Illinois, for example, which sends twenty-nine members to the electoral college, the voter is confronted at the polling-booth in November with a Democratic ticket of twenty -nine names and a Republican ticket of another twenty -nine. In 191 2 there was a Progressive ticket in addition. Though it is open to him to vote for some nominees of each party, solid voting is the almost unbroken rule, and since each man on the electoral panel chosen is pledged to cast his vote (in the following January) for the nominee of his party, it is known at once that a Democratic victory in Illinois means twenty -nine votes for the Demo- cratic candidate for the White House. The election, therefore, is virtually by States. As an expression of the popular opinion it is gravely imperfect, in that the minority in any State is entirely unrepresented. Thus in New York on one occasion a majority of no more than eleven hundred out of a poll of over a million gave the whole of the State representation of thirty -six (as it then was) to the Democratic candidate, while the Republican minority, consisting of over 49 per cent, of the electors polling, commanded not one electoral vote. In the Southern States, 76 PRESIDENT WILSOfT where the Democrats are svipreme, it is a waste of time for the Republicans to go to the polls, since they can nowhere secure a State majority, and are consequently entirely unrepresented in the electoral college. A further effect of the system is that the popular vote rarely bears any recognizable rela- tion to the electoral vote, since the party gaining a series of small majorities in populous States like New York or Pennsylvania or Illinois secures not merely a proportionate majority, but the whole State vote, in the electoral college. In the light of these facts the remarkable result of the 191 2 election becomes intelligible. In every State Mr. Taft and Mr. Roosevelt split the Republican vote and the Democratic went to Mr. Wilson. As a result, in forty States out of the forty-eight the Democratic candidate headed the poll and secured the State vote in the electoral college, though the combined popular vote of his two opponents almost always exceeded his. The final result was declared as follows : — Wilson Roosevelt ... Taft Though the three other candidates who ran were of little importance, their record may be given for the sake of completeness : — Electoral Vote. Popular Vote. - 435 6,286,987 ... 88 4,125,804 8 3.475,813 Electoral Vote. Popular Vote Debs (Socialist) 895,892 Chafin (Prohibition) 2CX),772 Rainier (See. -Lahoui) 38,814 THE 19 1 2 ELECTION -j-] Only two States, Vermont and Utah^ supported Mr. Taft, while Mr. Roosevelt carried Pennsyl- vania in the East, Michigan and Minnesota in the Middle West, and California, Washington, and South Dakota in the West. It was an astonishing' triumph for Mr. Wilson, CHAPTER V, THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS The feelings with which we face this new age of right and oppor- tunity 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 spokesmen and interpreters, 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. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us ; men's lives hang in the balance ; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust ? Who dares fail to try ? 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. — First Inaugural. March 191 3. Mr. Wilson's position on his assumption of office in March 19 13 was in one respect strong, in another equivocal. He was under the disad- vantage, more apparent indeed than real, of being a minority President. Apart from the million odd votes divided between the Socialist and other minor candidates, he had polled a g*ood million and a third less than the combined totals of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft. On the other hand, he found himself supported in the Sixty -third Con- gress, which succeeded to power simultaneously 7« THE NEW. PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 79 with himself, by a Democratic majority in both Houses. The importance of that backing lay in the fact that all Bills must be passed by both Houses and approved by the President, and a difference in political colour between President and Congress, or between the two branches of the latter, makes inevitably for legislative delay and friction. There was only one precedent since the Civil War for the complete enthronement of the Democrats. Cleveland, the one Democratic President since Buchanan, h^d a Republican majority against him in the Senate in both XTon- gresses (the Forty -ninth and Fiftieth) of his first term. In the first Congress of his second term (the Fifty-third) both Houses were Democratic, but the concurrence between executive and legis- lature was short-lived, for the Fifty-fourth Con- gress, 1895-7, was Repubhcan in both branches. It was reserved for Mr. Wilson's administration to revive the unremembered spectacle of Democ- racy dominant both at the White House and at the Capitol through the whole of a Presidential term. The announcement of the composition of the new Cabinet tended to confirm the President's hold over his party, and so over Congress. The two dhief posts were filled by Mr. Bryan and Mr. W. G. McAdoo, of New York, who in 191 4 married the President's youngest daughter. Mr. Bryan's selection as Secretary of State was a fore- gone conclusion in view of the part he had played in securing Mr. Wilson's nomination in the Demo- 8o PRESIDENT WILSON cratic Convention ; while Mr. McAdoo's claim to the Secretaryship of the Treasury was based largely on the impression he had created as a practical business man in carrying through the work of constructing the Hudson River tunnels. Mr. W. B. Wilson, the first Secretary of the newly constituted Department of Labour, was a miner and trade union leader of Scotch birth. I In estimating the prospects of the incoming President at the beginning of 1913 three factors had to be taken into account : the personality of Mr. Wilson himself, the nature of the concrete issues that confronted him, and the trend of developing political thought in America. The importance of the first of these had been strikingly demonstrated during Mr. Roosevelt's tenure of office. The ex -President in his autobiography throws into contrast the two ideals of the Presi- dency represented respectively by the Jackson - Lincoln and the Buchanan -Taft schools. It need hardly be added that he neither disguises his contempt for administrators of the latter class nor conceals the assertion of his own claim to rank with the former. In the seven and a half years of his administration Mr. Roosevelt had con- ' The other places were filled as follows : — Secretary ofVVar ... ... Lindley M. Garrison (New Jersey). Attorney-General ... ... J- C. McReynolds (Tennessee). Postmaster-General ... ... Albert S. Burleson (Texas). Secretary of the Navy ... Josephus Daniels (North Carolina) Secretary of the Interior ... Franklin K. Lane (California). Secretary of Agriculture ... W. F. Houston (Missouri). Secretary ot Commerce ... W. C. Pedtield (New York). THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 8i sistently lived up to his constitutional convictions. No President of recent times had initiated more formidable programmes of legislation, and no President had been more successful in bending Congress to his will. It is hardly too much to say that in the years 190 1-9 the doctrine of personal rule in the United States took on a colour it had not assumed since the days of Lincoln — and the circumstances of the Civil War were too abnormal to provide any valid precedent for the conduct of government in an ordinary Presidential term. With Mr. Taft's succession to office in 1909 the balance of power had shifted. Mr. Roose- velt had been swept forward by the impulse of an impetuous radicalism. Mr. Taft was cautious, constitutional, and conservative, and temperamentally incapable of the personal domin- ance that his predecessor had so effectually exerted. Under his regime Congress reasserted itself. In the Lower House insurgent Repub- licans made common cause with the Democrats in divesting the Speaker of his traditional power to determine the course of legislation by selecting from the intractable mass of Bills before the House the chosen few to which priority of dis- cussion might give an opportunity of passage into law. That prerogative was transferred to the Committee on Rules, which was better qualified than any single official could be to reflect the desires of the rank and file of the House. How was Mr. Wilson likely to stand with Congress ? In both Houses he could command 6 82 PRESIDENT WILSON a substantial Democratic majority, but the Demo- cratic Party was by no means homogeneous, and the President's independence of the machine was calculated to modify rather than consolidate his influence. There was room for some initial doubt, therefore, as to his power, as well as his desire, for effective personal leadership. As to the latter quality, however, conjecture had solid ground to build on. No man can go through the ordeal of a Presidential election without exposing the whole of his past career to the critical scrutiny of the world ; and in the four months preceding the November polling the electorate had learned enough of the President of Princeton and the Governor of New Jersey to justify the conviction that if the Democratic candidate reached the White House he would be content with the role neither of constitutional figurehead nor of auto- matic registrar of the decisions of Congress. His administration promised, in short, to be shaped on the Jackson -Lincoln-Roosevelt model, not the Buchanan -Taft. Opinion both in the legislature and in the country was disposed to approve that interpreta- tion of the Presidential function. In Congress Mr. Wilson was backed by a safe majority, and if many Democrats were inclined to be conserva- tive, many of the opposition were inclined to be radical. The Taft -Roosevelt controversy, indeed, had left the Republicans temporarily impotent. The antagonism between the advanced and reac- tionary wings of the party had crystallized in 191 I in the formation of the National Progressive THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 83 Republican League, of which Senator La Follette, of Wisconsin, was the leading spirit. The success of the Progressives at the polls — Roosevelt totalled over seven hundred thousand more votes than Taft — indicated a revolt, of which Mr. Wilson was in a position to taJke full advantage, against the old party alignments and the traditions of the political machine. In one of his campaign speeches the Democratic candidate had suggested that " the burden that is upon the heart of every conscien- tious public man is the burden of the thought that perhaps he does not sufficiently comprehend the national life." ' His election to the Presi- dency gave the speaker an opportunity such as few of his predecessors enjoyed of proving the quality of his own comprehension. He had behind him a political following that years of unbroken opposition had made oppor- tunist and uncertain of its principles and ideals. It lay with him to weld it into a self-conscious and purposive entity. He had around him and before him a commonwealth of citizens in swift but blind transition from old political allegiances to a new and still undiscerned concentration of forces. The impulse to revolt was stronger than the capacity to construct. Domination by party machines and exploitation at the hands of monopolies and trusts had stung a new and challenging individualism into activity. Men remembered afresh the ideals of those forerunners who had " brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the ' The Mew Freedom, chap ■", 84 PRESIDENT WILSON proposition that all men are created equal " ; and recognizing how far economic slavery had replaced that liberty, and plutocracy and privi- lege destroyed that heritage of equality, they were ready for any leadership that could carry them on to the re -establishment of the old ideals. Democracy demanded the right to reassert itself. The electorate claimed to choose its repre- sentatives, not merely to endorse the decisions of the caucus of machine -riggers that controlled the destinies of nine candidates out of ten. The institution of the direct primary in State and national politics, the movement for the indica- tion of " Presidential preference " by the indi- vidual voter, and the growing approval of the principle of the initiative, referendum, and recall • in many States, were all evidences of the same universal resolve for the recovery of popular control over administration. But the movement was no more than inchoate. The forces opposed to it— financial interests and party bosses — were powerful. Strong and decisive leadership was needed before all thmgs. In many respects Mr. Roosevelt was well qualified for the role of leader. He had vision, energy, and a wholesome contempt for tradition. But he was handicapped by his egoism and by the almost insuperable difficulty of converting an established party, and a party in power, to a policy of inno- ' Initiative : Right of a small percentage of the electorate (usually lo per cent.) to submit a Bill to the legislature and compel its con- sideration. Referendum : Right of the electorate to insist on the submission of new legislation to a popular vote. Recall : Right of petition for the removal of unsatisfactory public seivants. THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 85 vation and radical reform. He made the attempt, and wrecked his party. For the Democrats the task was easier. They were in enjoyment of the freedom of opposition. The main permanent plank in their platform, tariff reduction, was in line with the new movement of thought. They were sufficiently disintegrated to welcome the emergence of a new constructive programme. Standing as a Democrat Mr. Wilson had a unique opportunity. If he could rise to the demands of a supreme occasion there lay before him, not a successful party candidature but true national leadership. It was mainly in the field of domestic politics that leadership was called for. Abroad America had few commitments and only one anxiety. Some Democrats, it is true, were still exercised over the acquisition by a Federal State of a colonial empire, but the dominions were of small import- ance, and raised no serious administrative prob- lems. The Filipinos were being gradually trained for self-government and ultimate independence ; Porto Rico, another fruit of the Spanish -American war, was tranquil ; the Panama differences with Colombia were regarded as closed. In another category Cuba, her independence restored four years earlier after a period of American occupa- tion, was maintaining peace and achieving pros- perity. San Domingo was under American administration, but occupation by a handful of marines was sufficient to guarantee the good conduct of that inconsiderable republic. In one quarter only did trouble threaten. Since the 86 PRESIDENT WILSON • resignation of Porfirio Diaz in 1 9 1 1 Mexico had been subject to what might be termed indifferently a succession of revolutions or a perpetual anarchy. American lives had been lost and American property destroyed. Madero, the constitutional President, had announced that intervention by the United States would mean war. Mr. Taft had so far successfully averted that catastrophe, but with the situation growing steadily worse, he left an unenviable legacy to his successor. But it was in its effect on domestic legislation and administration that the fruits of the election of 19 1 2 were looked for first. Mr. Wilson had come in on a programme of radical Democracy. Almost every speech he delivered in the pre- election campaign had pledged him to a reasser- tion of the control of the people over legislation — expressed directly in the re -establishment of the freedom of election — to an attack on monopoly and privilege in industry and finance, to an aboli- tion of the sectional burdens and sectional endow- ments created by a high tariff, and to the extension of ameliorative legislation and social reforms. In entering on that crusade the new President had the mass of public sentiment with him. The Progressive platform had been even more radical than the Democratic. The newly con- stituted party had declared that it was " born of the nation's awakened sense of injustice," and that its supreme purpose was the maintenance of the ideal of government of the people by the people for the people. It was clear that Mr. THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 87 Wilson had little to fear from Progressive oppo- sition either in Congress or in the country so long as he held to the course mapped out in his own campaign speeches. His own party stood solid at his back. Since the Currency Act of 1900 the Democrats had abandoned the controversial issue of " free silver," and so removed a fertile source of dissension in their own ranks. More than that, in their insist- ence on the regulation of corporations and on industrial and admmistrative reforms in other directions they had committed themselves to the principle of a much more vigorous assertion of authority by the Central Government than the academic Democrat of the past could have approved. It is true that the Baltimore platform of 191 2 had insisted, in its section on State Rights, that " Federal remedies for the regula- tion of inter-State commerce and for the pre- vention of private monopoly shall be added to, and not substituted for, State remedies," but that rather perfunctory act of homage to party tradi- tion did not prevent the Convention from register- ing emphatic demands for the vigorous application and extension of existing Anti -Trust Laws ; for the ratification of the proposed Constitutional Amendment providing for a Federal Income Tax ; for more drastic regulation of railway, telegraph, telephone, and other corporations discharging public services ; for Federal development of waterways ; and, finally and more comprehen- sively, for a return to the unfettered rule of the people, whereby alone " can they fthe people] 88 PRESIDENT WILSON protect themselves from the misuse of delegated power and the usurpation of governmental instru- mentalities by special interests." It was clear, therefore, that a President com- mitted to effective action along these lines would enter on his task free from the fear of opposition proceeding from that school of States Rights exponents that had in the past dominated the Democratic Party. The States Rights doctrine had not been jettisoned, but the party, largely through the educative influence of its candidate's campaign speeches, had by the time Mr. Wilson entered on his office in March 19 13 swung itself completely into line with the President in its acceptance of such Federal action as the national situation demanded. President Wilson and his party were at one in the resolve to right certain wrongs. His vision went beyond theirs, and he foresaw that measures would be called for that the party as a whole had neither contemplated nor discussed. That raised no question of a mandate, for a President of the United States is at liberty to go where he will if his majofity in Congress will follow him. But it meant that the success of the Administration must be dependent on Mr. Wilson's power to consolidate and rein- vigorate his party and use it as a great instrument of national reform. It was twenty years since it had last been so used by a Democratic Presi- dent, and in the interval dissension, disappoint- ment, and the absence of responsibility had gone far towards rendering it a negligible influence in national (though not in State) affairs. THE NEW PRESIDENT'S PROSPECTS 89 Mr. Wilson had not been forced to party supremacy by the machine. He had been called to leadership by rebels against machine rule^ and he took with him into the party councils new ideals and an invigorating disregard for obsoles- cent political traditions. He had been chosen as candidate by delegates who realized what type of man they were nominating, and elected Presi- dent by voters who realized what type of man they were calling to office. It was a new type but a welcome type, and by thus expressing their confidence in him the rank and file of the Demo- cratic Party committed themselves to the loyal acceptance of his leadership. It was manifest already to the discerning that if he was to lead successfully he would necessarily remake the party in the process. CHAPTER VI THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE The nation has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals and neg- lected duties ; to a consciousness that the rank and file of the people find life very hard to sustain, that her young men find opportunity embarrassed, and that her older men find business difficult to renew and maintain because of circumstances of privilege and private advantage which have interlaced their subtle threads throughout almost every part of the framework of our present law. She has awakened to the knowledge that she has lost certain cherished liberties and wasted priceless resources which she had solemnly undertaken to hold in trust for posterity and for all mankind ; and to the convic- tion that she stands confronted with an occasion for constructive statesmanship such as has not arisen since the great days in which her Government was set up. — Speech of Acceptance, July 1912. President Wilson lost no time in putting his principles to the proof. He had pledged himself to an attack on privilege, and even before his actual inauguration preparations for that attack were in train. He was installed on March 4th, On April 7th Congress, which under normal circumstances would not have met till December, assembled in special session, summoned by the President to consider a new Tariff Revision Bill. " Every business question," Mr. Wilson had declared a few weeks earlier, " comes back sooner or later to the tariff." Accordingly it was to tariff revision that his attention was first turned. The details and destiny of the Bill prepared THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 91 under his personal direction must be separately- examined ; but it is important to recognize that it was no isolated measure, but an integral part of a comprehensive and deliberately concerted programme for the emancipation of the people from the fetters imposed by great commercial and financial interests. In the execution of that programme measures for corporation control and currency reform stood out side by side with tariff revision among a number of minor Bills directed to the same general end. There was no question of the urgency of the need for reform along all these lines. Republican administration, with the high Protection that formed a permanent plank in the party platform, had been the almost unbroken rule since the Civil War, and behind the shelter of a tariff wall there had grown up great industrial combinations that were rapidly achieving, and in some branches of trade had already achieved, a nation-wide monopoly. " The protective tariff " — to quote the President's own words — " has been taken advant- age of by some men to destroy domestic com- petition, to combine all existing rivals within our free -trade area, and to make it impossible for new men to come into the field." The main object of a trust tended to be, not to serve the public, but to throttle competition and use the resulting monopoly to force up prices and inflate profits. That process involved two main stages, the first being the absorption or consolidation of existing concerns, the second the resolute exclu- 92 PRESIDENT WILSON sion of every new competitor attempting to measure himself against the trust in the area — in some cases co -extensive with the Union itself — marked out for its operations. The mania for the consolidation of competing cornpanies was at its height in the closing years of the nineteenth century. " In the single year 1899," writes Pro- fessor H. C. Emery, of Yale,' " the nominal capital of newly formed combinations reached a total of $3,500,000,000,000^ of which, however, more than three-quarters represented the capital of the reorganized companies. In the following year the United States Steel Company was organ- ized with a capital of $1,100,000,000, besides a bonded indebtedness of $300,000,000. If a [ single corporation to control the vast iron and i steel business of the country could be successfully established, there seemed, indeed, no limit to the } process of consolidation." These developments had a sinister political side. It was essential that the great combinations should retain a free hand for their operations by keeping Congress, and still more the State legislatures, under their control. " Control " is perhaps too strong a term to apply to the subterranean intrigues at Washington by which powerful trusts were able to secure that Bills adverse to their interests were never reported out of Committee, or that duties by which they were sheltered were never lowered a point in a tariff revision. But it is not at all too strong to apply to the handling of State Legislatures by corporations. For a great ' Cambridge Modern History^ vol. vii, chap. xxii. THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 93 railway to command the " machine " of the dominant party in a State served by its system was a commonplace of American politics. The Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey and the Southern Pacific in California were cases in point. A corporation knows no politics, in the sense that it is indififerent which party it uses to secure its ends. If the Republicans are in the ascendant it will use the Republicans, if the Democrats the Democrats. It will retain counsel whose func- tions are exercised more largely in the lobby of the Legislature than in the law-courts ; it will keep the party campaign chest well stocked ; it will maintain permanent and effective under- standings with the local bosses ; its advertising gives it a hold over the more influential news- papers ; and a generous but judicious allocation of free passes to editors, politicians, and State officials secures a freedom from interference with " legitimate and beneficial industry " advan- tageous to directors and shareholders if not to the general public. Some of these practices are now forbidden by State or Federal legislation, but it needs little ingenuity to circumvent the veto, and where it cannot be circumvented it can often be ignored without serious consequences. The result of such corporation rule is that the railroad can always count on the Legislature to refuse authorization for the construction of com- petitive lines, and on the executive to turn a blind eye to the varying of freight rates from the schedules set out in the railroad's charter, to the substitution of dangerous level crossings for 94 PRESIDENT WILSON expensive bridges and embankments, or to the curtailment or inefficiency of stipulated services. Commercial domination of this character has for a generation been vitiating the political life of the Union. It finds one manifestation in the lobbying of the great industrial interests when a Tariff Bill is before Congress, and another in the extensive interlocking of directorships. What that means is seen on a small scale when half the members of the board of an inter -State railway are at the same time directors of a local lumber company or steel foundry seeking special freight rates from the railroad. It is seen on a national scale when the directorates of the great combines — oil or steel or railroads — have sufficient hold over the financial houses, as they usually have , through the interlocking of the directorships, to if close the market to potential trade rivals in need of a loan. A Money Trust is as real and as serious a peril as an industrial trust. The extent of the identity of interests between the financiers and the leaders of industry may be gauged by the fact that in 19 14, after the report of a Con- gressional Committee on money combines, the members of the great financial house of Morgan resigned thirty directorships of railroad and other companies, including the New York Central and other Vanderbilt lines, the Western Union Tele- graph Company, the United States Steel Corpora- tion, the Guaranty and other trust companies, and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The intimacy of the relationship between in' THE ATTAC?: ON PRIVILEGE 95 dustry and transport was emphasized by Mr. 1 ; Wilson himself. " When you reflect," he pointed i I out/ " that the twenty-four men who control the j > United States Steel Corporation are either presi- U dents or vice-presidents or directors in 55 per ' cent, of the railways of the United States, you .; : know just how close the whole thing is knitted 1 5 together in our industrial system, and how great ( / the temptation is." These evils had not grown to maturity un- challenged. Almost every session of Congress had seen the passage of legislation directed towards the restriction of the power of the com- bines. Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft had invoked the existing Anti -Trust Laws Vvith effect, and many combines and rings had been broken up. But there were grave diilRculties in the way. The United States lives under a double legal system, State and Federal, and the conflict of jurisdiction between the courts gave the com- bines, particularly where they were operating in several States with different laws, opportunities of immunity of which they were sufficiently astute to take full advantage. The Democratic platform of 19 1 2 was basing its judgment on a sinister record of unsuccessful anti -trust litigation when it insisted, in language curiously picturesque for a political manifesto, that there must be "no twilight zone between the nation and the State in which exploiting interests can take refuge from both." It is superfluous to enlarge on Mr. Wilson's ' The New Freedom, chap. viii. 96 PRESIDENT WILSON antagonism to a system opposed to every article in his political philosophy. Declaration of war fi on privilege and vested interests, the emancipation I I of the consumer oppressed by high tariffs and I I uncompetitive prices, and of the small employer crushed out of existence by the organized under- cutting of the trusts and restriction of access to , f credit, was the keynote of almost every speech he 1 ' delivered in the campaign of 191 2. It was therefore in full accordance with anticipation that the first domestic legislation announced for the opening session of the new Congress should be directed to the three kindred ends of lowering the tariff wall, curbing the power of the trusts, and stabilizing finance and opening up new paths of access to credit by a broad measure of currency reform. True to his expressed conviction that the tariff lay at the root of every business question, Mr. Wilson specified tariff revision as the first task of the Congl-ess which met in accordance with his special summons in April. That was no unfamiliar process. The McKinley Tariff of 1890, the Wilson Tariff of 1894, the Dingley Tariff of 1897, and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909, all represented the successive efforts of particular interests to shift the burdens of Pro- tection from their own shoulders or secure that its benefits should accrue to their own advantage. Of these the Wilson Bill alone (its author had no connection with the subject of this biography) was an attempt at a downward revision, and even that ended in a compromise that practically THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 97 stultified the measure. The session of 19 13 was to see, for the first time since the Civil War, a determiaecl and successful endeavour to approxi- mate to the traditional Democratic ideal of tariff" for revenue only. From the outset Mr. Wilson threw into striking relief those Presidential prerogatives which con- ferred on him the power of initiative. When Congress assembled on April 7th the two Houses met in joint session to hear the customary Presi- dential message delivered by the President in person. Not for over a century had such a scene been witnessed. Washington had been accus- tomed to address Congress in person, and his successor, John Adams, followed his example. Jefferson had discontinued the practice, preferring to transmit a written message, and no subsequent President, not even Jackson or Lincoln or Roose- velt, had revived it. Mr. Wilson's reversion to the earliest precedent was an eloquent indication of his views as to the right relationship between President and Congress. The Constitution de- liberately debarred the executive from close asso- ciation with the legislature. Neither the President nor his Ministers can sit in either House, and their communication with the two Chambers is limited to such intercourse as can be squared with the clause enacting' that the President '* shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." ' ' Constitution of the United States, Article II, section iii. 7 . ' 98 PRESIDENT WILSON Mr. Wilson determined that at least such asso- ciation as was permitted should be as close as pos- sible. In his undergraduate article on " Cabinet Government in the United States " in the Inter- national Review for August 1879, he had dwelt on what he called in another place " leaderless government," and advocated the establishment of Cabinet responsibility to Congress. There is no reason to suppose that the lapse of years had changed his convictions, and it is clear that as President he felt himself fettered by the limita- tions imposed by the Constitution. The result of those restrictions was to bring the party caucus into prominence as the medium through which, if at all, the President must initiate and control legislation. Since no member of the Cabinet could introduce or explain a measure on the necessity of which it was agreed, the only method was to entrust the Bill to one of the party leaders in the Senate or the House. If the majority in either Chamber was adverse to the Administration, the difficulties of the situation were of necessity much accentuated. From the first moment of its career to the last Mr. Wilson devoted himself by every means proper to his "''office to promoting the passage of the Tariff Bill. His initial message to Congress on its assembly in April confined itself to that question alone. The revision, in the President's words, was designed to forestall " a final hard crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the influences that quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive." To secure that end THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 99 " we must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage, and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a con- stant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world." The President could rely on a solid party majority, but even that did not mean plain sailing for his Bill. Democratic Congressmen were no more immune than Republican from the influences threatened interests could bring to bear. There were local considerations to weigh as well as financial. It was not an easy matter for the representative of a steel -producing or sheep- raising district to bring an entirely unbiassed mind to the discussion of the metal and wool schedules in the new Bill. Conscious of that, the President felt it the more necessary to exercise his personal influence at every point where his action or suggestion would have effect. The Bill was introduced into the House by Mr. Oscar Underwood, a Congressman (and subsequently Senator) from Alabama. The Committee on Ways and Means had begun to get it into shape even before the President had actually taken office, and he himself took an active part in their work. The details of the measure are less important than its general trend, and it is sufficient to mention the main changes it effected. Broadly speaking, its policy was to tax luxuries and free necessities. Many food commodities, such as lOO PRESIDENT WILSON wheat, flour, fish, potatoes, together with wool, coal, and leather, went on to the free list. Duties on clothing and textiles were reduced, and sugar was to be free after three years. At the same time the new Constitutional Amendment,' author- izing the levying of a Federal Income -Tax, was invoked for the first time, and a graduated tax, beginning with i per cent, on incomes over $4,000, was imposed. The yield of the reduced tariff and the income-tax was below expecta- tions, and new taxation had to be levied in 19 14. Thanks largely to the President's assumption of leadership in the tariff revision movement, the Bill had an easier passage than might have been predicted for so contentious a measure. It went through the House in a month, but at once ran foul of the usual obstacles in the Senate. The familiar lobbying was soon in full swing, and amendment after amendment in endless succes- sion was moved. Mr. Wilson let the process go unhindered for a time, and then intervened characteristically and with immediate effect. The Bill was a people's Bill, and the people's backing must be invoked to secure its passage. The President made a public statement on the measure. Declaring that he was ready to accept no com- promise, he called the attention of the public to " the extraordinary exertions being made by the lobby in Washington to gain recognition for certain alterations of the Tariff Bill." " Washing- ton," he asserted, " has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious, or so insidious a lobby. The news- ' Amendment XVI, declared in force February 1913. THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE loi papers are being filled with paid advertisements calculated to mislead, not only the judgment of the public men but also the public opinion of the country itself. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to maintain this lobby, and to create the appearance of a pressure of public opinion antagonistic to some of the chief items of the Tariff Bill." The appeal to the ultimate authority had its effect. The Senate passed the Bill at the end of September and President Wilson signed it, substantially in the form in which it was first introduced, on October 3rd. The first of his three measures of reform was safe in harbour. In 19 1 6 the Underwood Tariff Act was supple- mented by a useful measure constituting a stand- ing Tariff Commission. The President, who had not in the first instance favoured the appointment of such a Commission, came to recognize the \'alue of the work it might perform, and in January 19 1 6, in a letter to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the House, he outlined the proper functions of the proposed Board whose creation he advocated. " It should," he wrote, '* investigate the ad- ministrative and fiscal effects of the customs laws now in force or hereafter enacted ; the relations between the rates of duty on raw materials and those on finished or half-finished products ; the effects of ad valorem and specific duties, and the classifications of the articles of the several schedules ; the provisions of law and the rates and regulations of the Treasury Department re- I02 PRESIDENT WILSON garding entry, appraisement, invoices, and collec- tion ; and in general the working of the customs tariff laws in economic effect and administrative method." A Bill framed on these lines wias in due course passed into law, and at the end of 1 9 1 6 the President offered the chairmanship of the newly constituted Commission to Professor Taussig, the distinguished Harvard economist, an appointment that made an excellent impression. The legislation to which the remainder of the special session of 1913 was devoted, the passage of a Currency Bill, was in one aspect an attack on privilege, in that it effectively mitigated the danger of the concentration of credit in the hands of a Money Trust. But its purpose was much broader than that. For fifty years the banking and currency system of the United States had been unequal to its financial needs. It dated back to the Civil War, when, in order to secure a market for Government bonds. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, practically vetoed the issue of notes by all banks failing" to invest a third of their capital in such bonds. Banks complying with this con- dition could issue notes up to 90 per cent, of the face value of the bonds. The effect of that restriction was to stereotype a note issue which was not merely incapable of expanding to meet commercial needs, but in recent years had been steadily contracting ; for as the Government bonds increased in price (and notes could only be issued against the face value, not the current value, of the bonds) the banks preferred to sur- THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 103 render their right of issue, realize an their bonds, and employ their capital more profitably else- where. The artificial rigidity of the currency was a serious drag on commercial and industrial enterprise, and repeated attempts had been made to substitute a more efficient system. None had proved successful, and it was left to Mr. Wilson to introduce a comprehensive measure of reform that revolutionized the whole banking system of the United States. The President's success in carrying the Currency Bill through Congress is the more striking in that, as he frankly admitted, he possessed no expert knowledge of finance. In his speech of accept- ance to the delegates of the Democratic Conven- tion that nominated him for the Presidency he had declined to commit himself to dogmatic pro- posals, but laid it down that at least the system established should be designed to meet the requirements of merchants and farmers as well as bankers, and to frustrate that " concentration of the control of credit which may at any time become infinitely dangerous to free enterprises." But if Mr. Wilson had not the necessary quali- fications for drafting a programme of currency reform, he knew where to find the men who had. In his faculty for drawing on the knowledge and experience of authorities of recoghized eminence in fields where his own knowledge is limited the President has a good deal in common with Mr. Lloyd George. Each of them is always ready to call in the expert. Neither is prepared to be ^ subservient to him. And each has a ?ift for I04 PRESIDENT WILSON discussion and accommodation. In the case of the Currency Bill Mr. Wilson got the party leaders in the House early to work. As with the Tariff Bill, they were considering the form of the measure before the President was actually in- augurated. He himself took an active part in their conferences, and proposed to use the same personal influence in support of the Bill as he had exercised for the promotion of tariff revision. The Tariff Bill had been transmitted from the House to the Senate early in May. On June 23rd the President, again addressing Congress in person, started the Currency Bill on its way. His message was, as always, terse and vigorous. He emphasized the relation of the second gfeat measure of the session to the first. The Tariff Bill was designed to unfetter business, the Cur- rency Bill to open up new paths of enterprise and offer practical incentives to industrial expansion. " It is absolutely imperative," he declared, " that we should give the business men of this country a banking and currency system by means of which they can make use of the freedom of enterprise and of individual initiative which we are about to bestow upon them." The character of the new proposals was broadly indicated by the asser- tion that " we must have a currency not rigid as now, but readily, elastically responsive to sound credit, the expanding and contractinjg credits of everyday transactions, the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate dealings. Our bank- ing laws must mobihze reserves, must not permit THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 105 the concentration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary resources of the country, or their use for speculative purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruitful uses." The Bill as finally passed by Congress differed in some details, none of them fundamental, from the form in which it was originally introduced by Mr. Carter Glass, of Virginia, in the House at the end of June. The system it instituted was singularly simple and symmetrical, its central purpose being to stimulate the fluidity of credit on a national scale. To that end every national bank (i.e. a bank incorporated under Federal as opposed to State laws) must, and every State bank might, link itself to a new Federal Reserve Bank, of which twelve were to be established in twelve defined areas into which the Union was for this purpose divided. ' Every bank must become a stockholder in the Federal Reserve Bank of its district up to 6 per cent, of its paid-up capital, and deposit its reserves with the Federal Bank, which would always be under obligation to re- discount for a local bank, making payment in Federal Reserve notes. These, in their turn, were to be convertible into gold at any of the twelve regional Reserve Banks or at the United States Treasury. At the centre, and in control of the whole ' The twelve banks are situated at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland (Ohio), Richmond (\'irginia), Atlanta (Georgia), Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis (Minnesota), Kansas City, Dallas (Texas), and San Francisco. io6 PRESIDENT WILSON system, a Federal Reserve Board was to be estab- lished at Washington, directed by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Cur- rency, together with five members nominated by the President and approved by the Senate. Each regional Reserve Bank is controlled by nine directors, six chosen by its member banks and three by the Federal Reserve Board at Washing- ton. The twelve regional banks are purely bankers* banks, doing no business direct with the public. Their main function is issuing notes against commercial paper for the benefit of their member banks, and they must maintain a minimum gold reserve of 40 per cent, against such issues. In addition they are expected to act as clearing-houses for their member banks. The effect of the system is to prevent the accu- mulation of money power at any single centre or in the hands of any group of financiers ; and the network of conduit -pipes linking up every local bank with a regional Federal Reserve Bank, and through it with the Federal Reserve Board at Washington, gives every solvent banking house an absolute guarantee against stoppage of pay- ment through inability to liquidate its assets ; for a panic resulting" in a run so severe as to paralyze even the Reserve Board at the centre is hardly to be imagined. On the power conferred on the Reserve Board to do business in foreign markets it is not possible to dwell here, though it may in the course of tim.e make a new place for America in the field of international finance. It was significant that certain national banks imme- THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 107 diately took advantage of the Act by opening branches at Buenos Aires and other South American centres. No measure so revolutionary could look for an easy passage through Congress. It was opposed from the first by the bankers, who wanted a new Central Bank under their own control, and by conservatives like Senator Root and Senator Lodge, who feared an inflation of the currency, with resultant high prices. The Senate was almost evenly divided for and against the measure, but the President refused to countenance concession on any point of principle, and in the end the Bill, modified in certain unimportant particulars by agreement between the two Houses, was sent forward for his signature, which was affixed on December 23, 191 3. The Federal Reserve Board, with its twelve regional banks, came into being in the following year. It has as yet undergone no very exacting test, but the soundness of the scheme has been definitely vindicated. A typical verdict was that of Dr. C. W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard, who wrote of it that " no American administration has ever before accom- plished so great a contribution to the stability and efficiency of American credit and financial enterprise. Business men of all sorts — financial, manufacturing, and commercial — recognize the high value of this remarkable achievement." ' The prospect of facing the problems raised by the European War with no better system of cur- rency and reserve than the outworn legacy of ' Atlantic Monthly, October 191 5. io8 PRESIDENT WILSON Civil War days would have been impossible to contemplate. With the Currency Act is to be associated a measure on which Mr. Wilson had laid much stress in his pre-election speeches, the Rural Credits Act, though the measure embodying his views did not actually become law till more than two years later. The purpose of the Bill, first men- tioned in the President's message as part of the programme of 191 4, was to facilitate advances to farmers. It was finally passed in July 191 6.' The anti -trust legislation on which Mr. Wilson had laid constant stress in his campaign speeches was commended to Congress in the Presidential message of January 20, 1914- To estimate its importance the nature of the restrictions already in force needs to be appreciated. The instrument on which the Administration relied in its perpetual conflict with the trusts was the Sherman Act of 1890. The operative passage of that measure consists of the enactment that " every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal." Important as the Sherman Act was, it had many defects, chief of them the vagueness of its language. The question of whether a particular corporation repre- sented " a combination in restraint of trade " opened the door to endless forensic argument and conflicting legal decisions, while the Act was for a time emasculated through the verdict of the ' See p. 218. THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE 109 Supreme Court in 1895 ' that it applied only to commercial and not to manufacturing concerns. Later decisions modified the position by pro- nouncing favourably on the application of the Act to railway combinations, to " holding com- panies " (i.e. the merging of two or more com- petitive concerns in a corporation which acquires their stock and controls them), and to corners in staple products. It was also laid down that a labour boycott w!as a restraint of trade, and there- fore illegal under the Act. The real defect of the Sherman Act,- however, was that it provided no sound basis for dis- crimination between legitimate and illegitimate competition. "Big Business," as both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson recognized, is not necessarily an evil. It may result in large-scale production, enabling the manufacturer to supply the consumer with a better article at a lower price. The judges themselves appreciated that, and in the famous Standard Oil case in 1 9 1 i the Supreme Court laid it down that in each case the Court must decide "in the light of reason " whether the combination under discussion was or was not a deliberate attempt to restrain trade and competition. That was a common -sense ruling, but it threw a heavy responsibility on the Courts, and tended to divert to the judiciary a good deal of hostility that should have been directed against the legislature. The great merit of Mr. Wilson's proposals for the reinforcement of the Sherman Act was his ' United States v. Knight Sugar Refining Company. no PRESIDENT WILSON recognition of the fact that great combinations were not of necessity against the public interest, and his resolve to proceed by administrative as well as legislative methods. Mr. Roosevelt, who had worked the Sherman Act hard during" his terms of office, had taken the view that " the true way of dealing with monopoly is to prevent it by administrative action before it grows so powerful that even when courts condemn it they shrink from destroying it." ' Mr. Wilson was of the same opinion, and the central feature of the anti -trust legislation initiated by him in 191 4 was the institution of a Federal Trade Commission, such as Mr. Roosevelt had advocated but been unable to create. The essential reform, the Presi- dent had repeatedly insisted,^ was to " let in the light " on the constitution and operations of great corporations, and the Federal Trade Commission was invested with powers of investigation and mandate that went far towards dispelling the secrecy that proved so effective a protection to numbers of combinations palpably detrimental to the public interest. The Presidential message of January 1914 had ' Autobiography, chap. xii. ^ E.g. " The processes of capital must be as open as the processes of pohtics. Those who make use of the great modern accumulations ot wealth, gathered together by the dragnet process of the sale of stocks and bonds, must be treated as under a public obligation ; they must be made responsible for their business methods to the great communi- ties, which are, in fact, their working partners, so that the hand which makes correction shall easily reach them, and a new principle of responsibility be felt throughout their structure and operation " {The New Freedom, chap. vi). THE ATTACK ON PRIVILEGE in been awaited with- anxiety by the great commer- cial interests, but their apprehensions were largely allayed by its conciliatory tone. Mr. Wilson dis- claimed all intention of " unsettling business or breaking its established course athwart," and let it be understood that there was to be no blind and undiscriminating attack on all forms of big business, good and bad. The specific proposals he outlined provided for — 1 . The prohibition of " interlocking director- ates." I 2. An increase of the power of the Inter-State Commerce Commission over new railway issues. 3. A clearer definition of the term " in restraint of trade and commerce." 4. The creation of a Federal Trade Commis- sion. . j 5. The prohibition of "holding companies." \' 6. A simplification of legal processes in the interests of individuals suing' a corporation on facts proved in a Government suit. This programme was before Congress all the summer. The Bills encountered much opposition and underwent considerable emendation in the Senate, but before the session closed in October the President had secured the essence of his demands. He set his signature to two important measures, one the Federal Trade Commission Act, the other the Clayton Act, the main provisions of which ( i) strengthened the hands of an injured party under the existing anti -trust laws ; (2) defined certain abuses, discriminations, and re- ' See p. 94, supra. 112 PRESIDENT WILSON straints of trade, and empowered the Trade Com- mission to deal with them ; and (3) legalized the boycott in labour disputes. There is a close analogy between this last provision and the right of combination guaranteed to Labour in Great Britain under the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. The functions of the Federal Trade Commission have been outlined above.' The central feature of the law instituting it is the clause declaring that " unfair methods of competition in commerce are hereby declared unlawful." The Commission was furnished with extensive pov/ers of investi- gation into the affairs of corporations, with authority to issue orders, against Which appeals lie to the Federal Courts. Its creation meant a large and beneficial extension of administrative control over monopolies, corners, rings, and com- binations. The President could with justice claim that closed doors had been thrown open, dark places explored, and the wholesome light of pub- licity turned on the conduct of enterprises that formed in a fundamental sense a subject of public concern. ' P. IIO> CHAPTER VII THE MEXICAN PROBLEM What is it our duty to do ? Clearly everything that we do must be rooted in patience and done with calm and disinterested delibera tion. Impatience on our part would be childish, and would be fraught with every risk of wrong and folly. We can aflbrd to * exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its ' own strength and scorns to misuse it. It was our duty to offer our active assistance. It is now our duty to show what true neutrality will do to enable the people of Mexico to set their affairs in order again and wait for a further opportunity to offer our friendly counsels. The door is not closed against the resumption, either upon the initiative of Mexico or upon our own, of the effort to bring order out of the confusion by friendly co-operative action, should fortunate occasion offer. — Address to Congress, August 19 13. No feature of President Wilson's administration, with the exception of his relation to the European conflict, has exposed him to more unsparing criticism than his policy with regard to Mexico. No President, it is just to add, could have had any hope of cutting such a course through the multitudinous complexities of the problem as would satisfy every conflicting section of his critics. Mexico had for something like ninety years been a source of perpetual anxiety to the Govern- ment of the United States. The State had finally shaken off Spanish rule and constituted itself a federal republic in the year 1S24. Within the 8 "3 114 PRESIDENT WILSON next fifty years it could boast of fifty -two presi- dents or dictators, one emperor, and one regent, most of whom met violent deaths at the hands of their successors. In 1845 the incorporation of the once Mexican province of Texas into the Union of the United States led to the war of 1845-8, aspects of which are familiar to every one who has read the " Biglow Papers." As a result of Zachary Taylor's and Winfield Scott's campaigns in those years Mexico lost to the United States (in addition to Texas) the vast territories to. the west of the Rockies now represented by the States of California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Though there was never serious talk, except among a limited section in the South, of further encroachment on Mexican territory, Mexico re- mained permanently distrustful of her northern neighbour. Her suspicions were, however, partially dispelled by the attitude of the United States after the Civil War, when the Washington Government insisted on the termina- tion of the French occupation of Mexico (in accordance with the principles of the Monroe Doctrine), but took no step towards instituting an American suzerainty. The fortunes of the republic steadily improved after the advent to power in 1876 of General Porfirio Diaz, who, being re-elected for term after term, established what was not far removed from a dictatorship, on the whole salutary in its effects, lasting down to his abdication in May 1 9 1 1 . The withdrawal of Diaz's strong hand was the THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 115 signal for the outbreak of anarchical movements, which are still (January 1917) disastrously active. His own resignation was due to the rebellion of a faction, headed by Francisco Madero, hostile to the President's prolonged usurpation of power. Five months after Diaz's retirement to Europe — in October 191 1 — Madero was elected constitu- tional President of the Mexican Republic. Revolts against his rule followed immediately ; at least one of them, led by General Zapata, being generally supposed to depend on American interests (private interests, it heed hardly be added) for financial support. Madero, however, could count on the loyalty of the bulk of the Federal Army, and he maintained for a time a precarious tenure of power. The interest of the United States in afl'airs in Mexico was direct and intimate. Apart from the danger of incursions across the Texas frontier, which was at this time slight, there were heavy investments both of European and American capital in Mexican coalfields and oil wells, and large foreign holdings of railway shares and Government bonds. The United States was trustee for the property both of her own and of foreign investors, for she could only dis- countenance European intervention, as a breach of the Monroe Doctrine, if she was prepared to give the same guarantee for the protection of British or French or German interests in Mexico as the respective Governments would have secured by diplomatic or military action. President Roosevelt had fully recognized that principle when ii6 PRESIDENT WILSON he went debt-collecting on behalf of foreign investors in San Domingo, and none of his successors could logically repudiate it. None the less President Taft, who was in office during the earlier phases of the Mexican con- flict, exerted every possible effort to avoid American intervention. He knew how much easier it would be to get into a war with Mexico, or with a Mexican faction, than to get out again, and there were cogent reasons against the assump- tion by the United States of anything like per- manent responsibility for the internal government of the Latin republic. An extension of American influence south of the Rio Grande would have been received with suspicion and resentment in Mexico itself and in most of the South American States, and with undisguised disapproval in some European capitals. Fortunately for Mr. Taft, the problem had not in his time entered its acute phase. Madero was still in power as a consti- tutionally elected President, and though over a large part of the country his authority was openly flouted, America was able to avoid active inter- vention. In March 191 2 the President had for- bidden the exportation of arms to Mexico, but he felt able to return a reassuring answer to Madero's intimation that the first crossing of the border by an American trooper would mean war. And though American lives, as well as American property, were lost in Mexico in the course of the summer. President Taft maintained his atti- tude of neutrality without arousing serious criticism at home. THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 117 But the Republican administration left a dis- quieting legacy to its successor ; and the respon- sibility resting on Mr. Wilson when he assumed office, in March 19 13, was greatly augmented by the fact that barely a fortnight earlier Presi- dent Madero had been deposed and murdered, in favour of a rebel leader named Victoriano Huerta, who immediately proclaimed himself President . From this point onward conflicting interpreta- tions and estimates have been put on every article in the President's Mexican policy by rival schools of opinion in America. Each can make a respect- able case for its contentions. But if that policy is to be understood at all, it is necessary to take into account at the outset certain of the factors by which the President's action was determined. In the first place, he is temperamentally a pacifist, standing somewhere— precisely where is imma- terial — between the idealism of Mr. Bryan and the minatory self-restraint of Mr. Roosevelt. In the second, he was firmly resolved that no recog- nition should be extended to Huerta. In his eyes the soi-disant President was an assassin and a usurper. On Huerta's responsibility for the murder of Madero there was some conflict of opinion and no conclusive evidence, but the Presi- dent must be assumed to have been in possession of information sufficiently definite to justify his decision. But it is clear that the dominant idea in Mr. Wilson's mind from the first was the conviction that the remotest suspicion of American aggres- ii8 PRESIDENT WILSON sion in Mexico must be discouraged if the republics of Central and Southern America were to be satisfied as to the disinterestedness of any movement initiated by Washington for a closer association between them and the United States. The range of the President's views on a Pan- American alliance is more fully indicated in another chapter.' The ultimate judgment on them may be favourable or adverse, but it will at least be conceded that they fall under the head of true statesmanship, not of personal idiosyn- crasy or visionary idealism. Whether it was necessary or wise to adjust Mexican policy to the requirements of the larger Pan-American purpose is a debatable cjuestion. But to realize that such an adjustment was in fact being attempted is to start with an adequate compre- hension of the President's governing motive. Whatever the principles on which he based his action, an administrator in President Wilson's position was almost inevitably fated to hold to them too rigidly or deviate from them too lightly. The task of picking the one path of perfect wisdom almiong the treacherous and shifting quick- sands of Mexican rivalry and intrigue was beyond normal human capacity. It will be the business of the dispassionate historian of a later day to determine whether Mr. Wilson's mistakes were less or greater than any statesman of ability might be pardoned for committing in a like situation. The Mexican problem is still in process of solution, and no final judgment can as yet be ^ r. 138, seq. THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 119 passed on the quality or the effect of American diplomacy in that sphere. If Mr. Wilson was determined to discoun- tenance Huerta, he had no lack of alternative choices at his command . Felix Diaz, nephew of the former President, and Generals Carranza, Zapata, and Villa, were all in the field, any one of them ready to usurp the supreme power if fortune should sufficiently establish his position. In point of fact, however, the President had no desire to support a particular Mexican claimant as such. He was resolved that Huerta must go, but apart from that stipulation his hope was that the Mexican people would settle their own affairs by holding a constitutional election and choosing a President who would command general support. Meanwhile a waiting policy was to be observed, Huerta being refused American arms and American loans. This policy met, at any rate at first, with general approval in the United States, though American citizens in Mexico pressed for Huerta's recognition on the ground that he alone was capable of reducing the country to order. These representations would have been better received if the average American had not shared the President's disinclination to interfere in the internal affairs of another sovereign State in the interests of exploiters and concessionaires. It has largely escaped notice in that connection that President Wilson has tacitly enunciated the doctrine that nationals of one State operating in another State for their own benefit do so at their own risk — a striking departure from estab- I20 PRESIDENT WILSON lished international practice.' Some of the Presi- dent's " preparedness " speeches, however, were by no means consistent with that principle. It is impossible to trace in detail the bewilder- ing changes that followed the murder of Madero in February 191 3. The three outstanding events were the occupation of Vera Cruz by America in April 1914, the resignation and abdication of Huerta in July of the same year, and the formal recognition of Carranza at the end of 191 5. Mr. Wilson, having resolved under no circumstances to recognize Huerta, settled down, from the moment of taking office, to his policy of watchful waiting — hoping, while taking no active steps to give effect to the hope, for the defeat of the self- appointed President by the forces of Carranza and Villa, who claimed to represent constitutional government in Mexico. Events, however, gave no sign of moving in that direction, and the situation was rendered the more embarrassing by the studied correctness of Huerta's diplomatic attitude and the truculence of Carranza. In an address to Congress at the end of August Mr. Wilson stood by his policy, but admitted that ' " To President Wilson's administration the country owes its thorough committal to two policies which nearly concern its righteousness and its dignity. The first of these policies is — no war with Mexico. The second is — no intervention by force of arms to protect on foreign soil American commercial and manufacturing adventurers who of their own free will have invested their money or risked their lives in foreign parts under alien jurisdiction. . . . America has now turned her back on the familiar policy of Rome and Great Britain of protect- ing or avenging their wandering citizens by force of arms, and has set up quite a different policy of her own " (Dr. C. W. Eliot, Atlantic Monthly, October 1916). THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 121 so far it had had no satisfactory resuhs. He had sent a personal intermediary, ex -Governor Lind, of Minnesota, to urge Huerta to abandon his usurped position and arrange for the holding of a constitutional election at which he himself would not be a candidate. The proposal was declined. The President reaffirmed the neutrality of the United States, spoke hopefully of the ulti- mate effect of moral force, and declared an embargo on the export of arms from Union terri- tory to Mexico. The embargo was destined to be raised and reimposed for different reasons several times in the next two years. Huerta himself forced the next declaration by the President, his seizure of over a hundred deputies and the proclamation of an election to be held practically under duress evoking an announcement that no election held under such conditions could be recognized by Washington as valid. Anarchy continued, the undisciplined forces of Huerta, Carranza, Villa, and Zapata holding different parts of the country in sub- jection. In February 1914 the arms embargo was withdrawn, since it seemed to be injuring the Carranzists rather than Huerta. In April an un- expected incident precipitated a crisis. Early in that month a party of United States sailors who had landed at Tampico, the port of the Mexican oilfields, to obtain petrol, were put under arrest by a Huertist colonel. They were subsequently released with an apology, but Huerta, faced with a demand that the Mexican authorities should salute the American flag as an apology, pre- 122 PRESIDENT WILSON varicated and offered an unacceptable compro- mise. An ultimatum was dispatched by Mr. Bryan, as Secretary of State, and the President appealed to Congress to invest him with power to take such armed action as the situation might demand. The House at once complied, but before the Senate could pass the necessary resolution orders were sent to the Admiral in command of the squadron off Mexico to seize the custom-house at Vera Cruz. Vigorous protests against the President's cavalier treatment of the Senate were entered by Senator Root, Senator Lodge, and others, but the explanation that immediate action was necessary in order to prevent the expected landing of a cargo of arms for Huerta was generally accepted as satisfactory. Incidentally a nice constitutional point had been raised, for while the President of the United States has unlimited authority over the armed forces of the Union, it is not he but Congress that declares war. If the landing at Vera Cruz was an act of war, the President had gone beyond his powers. Americans, however, were too anxious to know whether they were committed to a Mexican war to split hairs over the Constitution, and Mr. Wilson could count on the full support of the nation in any action he might find it necessary to take. So far, however, all that was involved was a local and limited measure of intervention — inter- vention both uncontemplated and undesired by the interveners . To make matters worse, the Vera THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 123 Cruz landing was resented by Carranza, equally with Huerta, as an invasion of the sovereign rights of Mexico. But the possible dangers of the situation were averted, and though the American landing-party came in for some sharp fighting^ though not merely the custom-house but the whole port was seized, and though the occupation was maintained for nearly eight months, the feared breach between the United States and Mexico as a whole did not take place. President Wilson attended the funeral of seven- teen American sailors killed at Vera Cruz, and declared that they had died in " a war of service." ' Meanwhile events had taken a new turn with the proposal of the so-called A. B. C. Powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, to mediate in the Mexican quarrel . This association of the South American Powers with the United States opened up large questions, on which something more must be said in another chapter. ^ Their action was warmly welcomed by Mr. Wilson, and a " " We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind if we can find a way. We do not want to fight the Mexicans ; we want to serve them if we can. A war of aggression is not a war in which it is a proud thing to die, Ixit a war of service is one in which it is a grand thing to die. " I never was under fire, but I fancy there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire. I fancy it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you. When they shoot at you they can only take your natural life. When they sneer at you they can wound your heart. The cheers of the moment are not what a man ought to think about, but the verdict of his conscience and the conscience of mankind." {Speech at funeral at Brooklyn Navy Yard. ) =" P. 138, infra. 124 PRESIDENT WILSON Mediation Conference, attended by rtpresentatives of all four Powers, met on Canadian soil at Niagara Falls in May 19 14. Huertist delegates were present. Carranza, after temporizing and refusing, finally sent representatives, who were, however, excluded from the Conference because the leader for whom they professed to speak declined to assent to an armistice while deliberations were in progress. The Niagara Falls Conference had no direct result, and fierce fighting continued in Mexico. The complications of the situation were increased by a quarrel between Carranza and Villa ; but in the meantime Ilucrta's position was becoming more and more untenable, and his determination to resign was rumoured. In the middle of July he left Mexico City, and within a week he had set sail for Europe, having first nominated his Foreign Secretary, Francisco Carbajal, as Pro- visional President. Huerta's elimination closed one chapter in the diplomatic contest with Mexico. Mr. Wilson had never consented to recognize him, though most of the European Powers had done so within a month of his usurpation, taking the view that he was at least the de faCto ruler of Mexico and that to sustain his autliority was the most effec- tive way to secure the pacification of the country and the protection of foreign interests. The President was justified in claiming that his policy of watchful abstention had had its reward ; but the cpiestion remained whether the result achieved had involved an undue sacrifice of American in- THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 125 terests, and whether a settlement in Mexico would be any more practicable after Huerta's departure than it was before. To that both affirmative and negative answers were confidently returned by differing schools of political opinion in the United States. It could not be claimed that the position showed any immediate improvement. The Huertist nominee, Sefior Carbajal, held office for just a month, and then began a further pro- longed period of anarchy, in which the three predominant figures were Carranza, Villa, and Zapata. Each of them held a portion of the country under military control, each of them gained temporary possession of the capital, and there was generally under negotiation some short- lived combination of any two of the factional leaders against the third. In October (19 14) an abortive conference between the three v/as held at Aguas Calientes. In November the American forces were withdrawn from Vera Cruz. In December the self-declared President Zapata was at Mexico City, the self-declared President Villa with his forces a little farther to the north, and the self -declared President Carranza at Vera Cruz. Villa for a time appeared to be in the ascendant, but the balance of power was perpetually shift- ing as the lieutenants and nominees of the different generals betrayed their respective leaders. After another six months of continued anarchy Mr. Wilson made a further move. In January (191 5) he had delivered a brief but much-dis- 126 PRESIDENT WILSON cussed speech at Indianapolis, in which he declared that it was not the business of the United States to interfere in Mexican internal affairs, even to reduce anarchy to order. " Have not the European nations," he asked, " taken as long as they wanted and spilled as much blood as they pleased in settling their affairs, and shall we deny that to Mexico because she is weak? No, I say. I am proud to belong to a great nation that says, ' This country which we could crush shall have as much freedom in her own affairs as we have.' " Events, however, compelled a change of atti- tude, and at the beginning of June 191 5 (when Washington, and the whole nation, was deeply preoccupied with the Liisitanm, controversy), the President issued a statement to the American people through the Press declaring that the United States could not permit the conditions then exist- ing in Mexico to continue. Failing the immediate establishment of a constitutional Government by the Mexican leaders, the United States Govern- ment would be constrained to decide what means it should employ " to help Mexico to save herself and serve her people." The warning had no immediate result, and early in August a conference of delegates of Latin -American States met at Washington on the invitation of the United States Government. In addition to the three A. B. C. Powers, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Uruguay were represented on this occasion. The conference issued a memorandum giving Mexico three months to put her affairs in THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 127 order, in default of which joint Pan-American intervention would be undertaJcen . By this time, however, the Caxranzistas were gradually estab- lishing a mastery over their rivals, and by the end of October they were in effective possession of more than two-thirds of Mexico. At this point Mr. Wilson decided to recognize Carranza and his Government, and early in December Great Britain and the rest of the Entente Powers simul- taneously extended similar recognition. The close of the year 1 9 1 5 appeared to bring a new dawn of hope for Mexico. Once again Mr. Wilson might claim, with at least a colourable show of justice, that his policy of abstention had had its reward . But there would appear to be no finality in a Mexican settlement. The year 19 16, which it was hoped would see the progressive and com- plete pacification of the distracted country, was to bring the Washington Government far closer to open war with Mexico than it had been even at the height of the Vera Cruz crisis. The fact that Carranza had been recognized did not mean that Villa was done with. In January his bandit forces gave evidence of their activity by murdering a party of fifteen Americans near Chihuahua, and two months later a Villista raiding party four hundred strong crossed the American frontier, descended on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, was engaged by United States cavalry, and finally retired with considerable loss^ against which was to be set the death of four American cavalrymen and eleven civilians. 128 PRESIDENT WILSON The whole Mexican problem was reopened in the most acute form. A punitive detachment was ordered to pursue the bandits across the Mexican frontier, and preparations were made for sub- stantial reinforcements to follow on its heels. On March 1 5th five thousand American troops under General Pershing crossed the border in pursuit of Villa. The difficulties and possible consequences of the enterprise were fully under- stood at Washington. The prospects of rounding up the bandit were small, for he was a skilful guerilla leader, and the ground, broken every- where by valleys and mountains, suited his purpose admirably. At the .same lime the effect on Mexico of an American invasion, even under the g'uise of a punitive expedition, was problematic. Car- ranza at once showed sighs of resentment, and though he was pacified for the moment by a reciprocal agreement authorizing him to pursue Villistas across the American border in case of need, both his good faith and his authority over his followers remained doubtful. The Pershing expedition made rapid progress, penetrating so far into Mexico as to excite grave apprehension as to its fate in the event of a sudden coalition between Villistas and Carranzistas against the invader. The troops, however, foug'ht a suc- cessful engagement, in which Villa was for a time believed to have been killed, and then, in the middle of April, Washington learned simul- taneously of the issue by Carranza of a truculent note demanding the withdrawal of the troops, and of a treacherous attack by a town mob on an THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 129 American detachment passing through Parral in the State of Chihuahua. Early in May a con- ference between the United States Generals Scott and Funston and the Mexican General Obregon resulted in a temporary and unsatisfactory com- promise, and a week later Mr. Wilson called out the militia of the border States of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico for patrol work. Carranza's attitude grew more threatening, and at the end of May he again demanded with menaces the withdrawal of the American force. On June i8th Mr. Wilson called out the militia of all the American States for service on the Mexican border, but most of them mobilized in a state of deplorable inefficiency. A firm Note was at the same time dispatched to Carranza and warships were ordered to Mexican ports. Meanwhile news arrived of a serious collision between American troops and a body of official Carranzistas (not the outlaw Villistas) at Carrizal, ninety miles south of El Paso. Seventeen Americans were captured and forty killed. War — for which America had no adequate military provision — now appeared inevitable, but at the end of June the situation suddenly eased, Carranza releasing the seventeen American prisoners, and a little later proposing the sub- mission of outstanding questions to a Joint Com- mission of representatives of the two countries. President Wilson accepted the suggestion, and the Commission was appointed and began its deliberations at New London (Connecticut) early i.n September, transferring later to Atlantic City 9 I30 PRESIDENT WILSON (New Jersey). The tension diminished while a modus Vivendi was under discussion, and though General Pershing's force still remained in Chihuahua, a considerable proportion of the militiamen were sent back to their own States. The position at the end of 1916 was that the Commission had worked out a scheme for a joint patrol of the border calculated to remove the danger of future raids. Carranza declined the proposal. Villa had not been caught, and there was little prospect that he would be. Under those circumstances the early withdrawal of General Pershing's force was regarded as certain, and at the end of January 19 17 the War Depart- ment at Washington definitely announced its recall. Mexico was once more to be left to work out its own salvation. A comparatively detailed examination of the Mexican problem has been needed to demonstrate the nature and magnitude of President Wilson's difficulties. His critics — and they are many — maintain that he has shown himself a pure oppor- tunist in his attitude towards Mexico ; that he has never evolved a settled policy ; and that such action as he has taken from time to time has been bad for the United States and bad for Mexico. Mr. Roosevelt has characteristically declared that more American lives have been sacrificed while peace was raging in Mexico than were lost in the whole of the Spanish -American War. It is con- tended that in declining to recognize Huerta the President actually defeated his own object, by enabling the usurper to appeal effectively to THE MEXICAN PROBLEM 131 national resentment against foreign interference ; that in attempting to influence the succession to Diaz, Mr. Wilson went beyond his constitutional powers ; that he has throughout failed to uphold American prestige and defend American material interests ; that his advice to American citizens to leave Mexico was a confession of weakness ; and his impositions and withdrawals of the embargo on the export of arms an indication of vacillation and indecision. That on the one hand. On the other, it is certain that even in the crisis of 1 9 1 6 the bulk of the American nation desired above all things to be kept out of war, partly on account of the inadequacy of the military establishment, partly because it was generally held that the result of war must be annexation, a course which would have aroused bitter hostility and suspicion throughout the whole of Latin America. As it is, the supporters of Mr. Wilson's Mexican policy maintain, signal proof has been given of the absolute disinterestedness of the United States, and the fruits of the President's adhesion to that high principle will be reaped in the establishment of a new relationship of trust and confidence with the numerous republics of Central and South America. Full justice will be done to the case for Mr. Wilson under this head if it is finally summarized in some striking declarations made to a New York paper ' in July 1 9 1 6 by one of the ablest members of the Cabinet, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior. ' New York World, July i6, 1916. 132 PRESIDENT WILSON " President Wilson's Mexican policy," Mr. Lane asserted, " is one of the things of which, as a member of his Administration, I am most proud. It shows so well his abounding faith in humanity, his profound philosophy of democracy, and his unshakable belief in the ultimate triumph of Liberty, Justice, and Right. He has never sought the easy solution of any of the dilficult questions that have arisen in the last three years. He has always sought the right solution. " Mr. Wilson's Mexican policy has not been weak and vacillating. It has been definite and consistent, firm and constructive. The policy of the United States toward Mexico is a policy of hope and of helpfulness ; it is a policy of Mexico for the Mexicans. " President Wilson has clearly seen the end that he desired from the first, and he has worked toward it against an opposition that was cunning and intensive, persistent and powerful. If he succeeds in giving a new birth of freedom to Mexico, he most surely will receive the verdict of mankind." Between the?e conflicting estimates every student of the fact."? is qualified to make his choice. CHAPTER VIII FOREIGN POLICY AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE One of the chie. objects oi my Administration will be to cultivate the friendship and deserve the confidence of our sister republics ot Central and South America. The United States has nothing to seek in Central and South America except the lasting interest of the peoples of the two continents, the security of governments intended for the people and for no special group or interest, and the develop- ment of personal and trade relationships between the two continents, which shall redound to the profit and advantage of both, and interfere with the rights and liberties of neither. From these principles may be read so much of the future policy of this Government as it is necessaiy now to forecast. — Presidential Statement of March ii, 1913. For ninety years the Monroe Doctrine has been the charter of American foreign policy. It has never had, and has not now, any legal sanction. It is not embodied in the American Constitution. It has never been adopted as a permanent policy by a joint vote of the two Houses of Congress. Its prima facie authority is such as pertains to an enunciation of policy by a President of no par- ticular distinction at a time when little more than a generation had elapsed from the final establish- ment of American independence. The true importance of the Monroe Doctrine is derived, not from the immediate circumstances which evoked its formulation, but from the fidelity with which it voices the consensus of political thought on the foreign relations of America from 134 PRESIDENT WILSON Washington's day to Wilson's. The history of the Doctrine may be briefly recalled. Throughout the second decade of last century the Spanish colonies in Latin America had been in revolt against the mother country. In 1822 the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) took in hand the chaotic afTairs of Spain, and it became apparent that the immediate sequel to the settle- ment of Spain in Europe would be an expedition for the subjugation of the revolted Spain in America. That prospect was equally distasteful to Great Britain and to the United States ; to Great Britain by reason of her distrust of the gtowing power of the Holy Alliance ; to the United States on account of her sympathy with what were now the South American republics, and her fear of the consequences of a bitter and prolong'ed war close to her borders. Accordingly Canning took counsel with the then American Minister in London, Richard Rush, and out of their conversa- tions emerged the declaration in respect of which Canning three years later claimed that he had " called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." That declaration was addressed by President Monroe to Congress in his (written) message of December 2, 1823. It fell under three heads, the following being the salient clauses : — I . " We should consider any attempt on their [the members of the Holy Alliance] part to extend their system ' to any part of this hemisphere as ' i.e. monarchy. FOREIGN POLICY 137 dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European Power we shall not interfere." 2. " Our policy in regard to Europe ... is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its Powers." 3. "The American continents . . . are not henceforth to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European Power." The Doctrine embodied the policy succinctly defined by the aged Jefferson six weeks earlier in a letter to Monroe, laying' it down that " our first and fundamental doctrine should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe, our second never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis -Atlantic affairs." It was invoked by Andrew Johnson when he insisted on the evacua- tion of Mexico by French forces in 1867, and by Cleveland when he claimed a voice for the United States in the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain in 1895 ; while President Roosevelt carried it a step further in taking over the financial administration of San Domingo in 1907 in order to satisfy claims that might otherwise have justified intervention by foreign creditors. When Mr. Wilson took office in 191 3 he found himself committed to a foreign policy, and an application of the Monroe Doctrine, of which not more than three of his predecessors had had ex- perience. The exclusion of European Powers from colonization of American soil had been sufficient to safeguard the continent in the days PRESIDENT WILSON when Monroe's Doctrine was formulated. It was not sufficient when the Russo-Japanese War had suddenly revealed the presence, ten days' steaming across the Pacific, of a nation equal in military achievement to any European Power, and destined inevitably to seek early opportunities of expan- sion. The need for broadening the formula became very clear during the presidencies of Mr. Wilson's immediate predecessors, and an unofficial corollary was added to it by a declaration of the Senate in 1 9 1 2, when Japanese were reported to be negotiating for interests in a harbour on the western coast of Mexico, that such a development could not be viewed by the United States without grave concern. The new importance attaching to foreign policy generally arose from the fact that down to the Spanish War of 1898 America had had no over- seas possessions and never contemplated acquiring any. No provision was made in the Constitution for the administration of dependencies that were neither States of the Union nor self-governing territories, and there was a strong feeling that for a democracy, certainly for a federal democracy, dependencies were an anomaly. When at the end of the war with Spain the Union found itself unexpectedly and through force of circumstances in possession of a number of islands in the Atlantic and Pacific, the first thought was how to get rid of them again. Cuba was never fully acquired. It was given its independence, with certain reser- vations in the matter of its foreign relations, and it now conducts its own affairs under a very loose FOREIGN POLICY 137 American suzerainty. The Philippines were a more serious problem, as they were clearly not ready for immediate self-government, and these islands, like Porto Rico, were put under an execu- tive appointed by the President of the United States, with a Chamber elected on a popular franchise . The Democratic platform of 1 9 1 2 demanded that the United States should " recog- nize the independence of the Philippine Islands as soon as a stable Government can be estab- lished." Mr. Wilson took an early opportunity of indicating his approval of that policy, (and it was clear that the matter would come before Congress before the new Administration had run its course. But more important than any single issue in this field was the attitude of the President to the policy declared in the Monroe Doctrine and all the implications arising from it. The Doctrine was popularly regarded, and with much justice, as being mainly negative and precautionary in character. Europe was warned off America ; America was pledged against interference in Europe. To Mr. Wilson Monroe's principle in- volved much more than that. Apart from the European War, which, as the President early realized, may entail a radical restatement or an almost entire abandonment of the Doctrine, he recognized that it must have positive applica- tions hardly less important than the negative. If it conferred rights it equally imposed duties. America could not prohibit European interference in countries where large European interests were at stake unless she was prepared to assume some 138 PRESIDENT WILSON trusteeship for those interests herself. That doc- trine had been severely strained in Mexico, and had European Powers been less ready to repose confidence in Mr. Wilson a serious position might have arisen. In the island divided into the repub- lics of San Domingo and Hayti the United States was compelled, out of regard to its own and foreign interests, to enter and administer, the responsibility being assumed in the case of San Domingo by Mr. Roosevelt and in the case of Hayti by Mr. Wilson. But President Wilson carried the Monroe Doc- trine farther still. Influenced at once by a sincere altruism and by a necessary regard for the inter- ests of the United States, he visualized a relation- ship between the twenty-one republics of the American Continent that would, so far as there is any faith in bonds and treaties, guarantee the whole continent against the perils of external attack and internal dissension. The danger of such attack was no mere bogy of apprehensive statesmen. Mention has already been made of American distrust of the intentions of Japan, and the European War had inspired equal anxiety as to Germany's future attitude towards South America. In this country there seems to be no popular recognition of the almost limitless poten- tialities of South America, or of the culture and prosperity to which many parts of Argentina, Brazil, and other States have already attained. There is no such lack of knowledge or of enter- prise in Germany. German capitalists and traders have of late years been concentrating their efforts FOREIGN POLICY 139 on South America, and characteristically applying themselves to their task with far more thorough- ness than their rivals of other nations ever exhibited . " The number of North Americans in Buenos Aires," wrote a well-known American author in 1911, "is very smaJl. While we have been slowly waking up to the fact that South America is something more than ' a land of revolutions and fevers,' our German cousins have entered the field on all sides. The Germans in South Brazil are a neglig'ible factor in international affairs, but the well-educated young German who is being sent out to capture South America commercially is a force to be reckoned with. He is going to damage England more than Dreadnoughts or gigantic airships." ' The German trader in South America is as great a menace to the United States as to Great Britain, for it is south of Panama that the American manufacturer should find the chief market for his growing output. The urgency of Germany's need for commercial expansion after the war is palpable, and unless she secures such peace terms as only victory can give her, it will be to South America first that she will look for her market. The gravity of that prospect in President Wilson's eyes lies not in the possibility of acute competi- tion with American traders, but in the danger of the financial penetration of some weak Latin State, with the almost inevitable sequel of diplo- matic or even military intervention by the lending * Hiram Bingham, Across South America. I40 PRESIDENT WILSON Power in the case of friction or default. In that event Washington would have the choice between washing its hands of the Monroe Doctrine and embarking on a war with Germany. There was only one sure way in which that danger could be averted. The European Power that could look with contempt on Guatemala or Costa Rica or Nicaragua would find it a perilous adventure to come into collision with a Pan- American alliance backed by the naval and financial resources of the United States and Argentina and Brazil — so perilous, indeed, that the mere existence of the alliance would be an almost certain guarantee ag'ainst aggression. That, at least, was President Wilson's belief, and its influence can be traced through the whole of his foreign policy. He was fully conscious that there could be no question of tutelage by the United States. The mere suspicion of such tutelage was the greatest obstacle to the project he had set before him. A strong tendency towards jealousy and distrust marked the attitude of every Latin -American State towards the Union, fostered by such specific influences as the memory of the seizures of territory from Mexico in 1846 and the more recent acquisition of the Panama zone during Mr. Roosevelt's Presidency. There was a general belief that the fixed aim of the United States was the extension of her political influence southward, and if that suspicion had been encouraged by armed intervention in Mexico all hope of carrying through a Pan-American agreement would have been finally dissipated. FOREIGN POLICY 141 As it was Mr. Wilson was able, not merely to avoid creating suspicion, but actually to use the Mexican trouble as an instrument for the further- ance of his larger purpose, by meeting on equal terms in 1914, and again in 191 5, delegates from several of the Latin -American States in conferences on a Mexican settlement. Those guarantees of the good faith of the United States assured a favourable reception for the proposals publicly outlined by the President at the Pan-American Scientific Congress at Wash- ington early in 1916. The conference was ostensibly devoted to scientific deliberations. Actually it was the occasion for the discussion of a pronouncement of the most vital and far- reaching importance to every American State. That pronouncement was embodied in the speech delivered by President Wilson on January 6th, when he laid before the Congress proposals for the conclusion of an understanding between all the American Republics on the following basis : — 1 . Mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity. 2. Settlement of all disputes not touching in- dependence by arbitration or friendly discussion. 3. Maintenance in every State of the republican form of government. 4. No equipment of a revolutionary force in, or exportation of arms from, one State to the detriment of the Government of another. In view of tlie frequency of filibustering expe- ditions across the boundaries of certain Central 142 PRESIDENT WILSON and South American States the importance of the last provision needs no emphasis. Mr. Wilson's proposals were endorsed at the same Congress by Mr. Lansing, the Secretary of State, who dwelt on the value to every American republic of an understanding that would give expression to their common ideals for their com- mon benefit. The proposals were received with general approval, and negotiations for the con- clusion of a series of treaties to carry them into effect have since been in progress, though none of the treaties have as yet (February 1917) been ratified. The full significance of President Wilson's Pan- American alliance cannot yet be gauged, for it opens up possibilities on which it is too early to pronounce. In one direction extension inevitably suggests itself. The Pan-American proposals as at present outlined embrace the whole of the American continent from Cape Horn to the Great Lakes. Is it impossible that the northern limit should be, not the Great Lakes but the Arctic Ocean ? That is manifestly part of a much larger problem. British colonies, even self-governing colonies, do not enter into diplomatic agreements independently of the Mother Country, and the question of Great Britain's alliances will have to be considered as part of, or as sequel to, the war settlement. It need only be remarked that an alliance between the British Empire and a league of Pan-American Republics would provide a new and durable element of stability in inter- national politics. The possibility of such a FOREIGN POLICY 143 development has not been overlooked in America, where it was pointed out by responsible critics immediately on the publication of Mr. Wilson's speech that it was absurd to talk of Pan- Americanism and ignore the fact that one of the greatest of the American Powers was not included in it ; and that only a combination of the Latin Republics, the LInited States, and Great Britain could make Pan -Americanism a safe and useful principle of foreign policy. The Pan-American proposals are essentially an extension of, not a derogation from, the Monroe Doctrine, for they provide effective safeguards for the Doctrine's central principle, the prohibi- tion of European interference in American affairs. Incidentally they are calculated to dispel all Latin suspicion of the United States, for they will, if ratified, effectively prevent the Washington Government from acquiring by conquest or annexation a single square foot of territory south of the Rio Grande. What effect they might have on European commercial penetration in Latin America is problematic, but the tendency would no doubt be towards the policy publicly advo- cated by Mr. Wilson, of inviting the financier from the Eastern hemisphere to come rather as an investor than a concessionaire. Mr. Wilson's Pan-American aims have been discussed thus early in this chapter on account of the light they throw on the character of his foreign policy as a whole. He has always looked beyond the immediate interests of the United States, and it is not surprising that a section of 144 PRESIDENT WILSON his compatriots should accuse him from time to time of idealistic altruism. The grounds for that charge were provided by a number of decisions taken by the President in the first two years of his administration. The first of these, notable only as a revelation of Mr. Wilson's point of view, was his advice to American financiers to with- draw from the Six Power Group in China, on the ground that America ought to have no part in arrangements that promised to infringe China's diplomatic and territorial integrity. Far more important was the President's action in regard to the Panama Canal Tolls in 19 14. That ques- tion was a legacy from the previous /Administra- tion. When Great Britain had agreed to leave the United States a free hand in the construction of the proposed Panama Canal it was stipulated, by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901, that the tolls levied should apply to the shipping of all nations equally and without discrimination. In spite of that an Act had been passed by Mr. Taft's Administration in 1 9 1 2 exempting all coastwise shipping from tolls. The ground taken by the defenders of this measure — including Mr. Taft, himself a jurist of some distinction — was that as coastwise trade was confined to American vessels decisions taken with regard to it were no concern of any external Power, a position vigorously con- tested by the British and other European Govern- ments. No agreement had been reached when Mr. Wilson took office, and the expiring' Congress had not responded to Sir Edward Grey's proposal to submit the whole matter to arbitration. There FOREIGN POLICY 145 was a considerable body of opinion in America which held that the Act of 191 2 had contravened existing treaty obligations, but against that was to be set the strong national feeling of some millions of patriotic citizens quite unqualified to pronounce on the legal merits of the case. President Wilson early decided that the Act must be repealed, though the Democratic plat- form of 1 9 1 2 had pronounced in its favour . There was no opportunity of dealing with the question in the crowded session of 191 3, but in March 19 14 the President went down to Con- gress to urge the cancellation of the exemption provisions. In a brief but impressive address he gave it as his judgment that " exemption is in plain contravention of the Treaty with Great Britain concerning the Canal concluded on November 19, 1901 " ; and in the light of that conclusion he proceeded (in language that is not v/ithout a bearing on the much -discussed " too proud to fight " passage in a later speech) to contend that " we are too big and powerful and too self-respecting a nation to interpret with too strained or refined a reading of words our own promises just because we have power enough to give us leave to read them 3.S we please," and that as a consequence " the large thing to do is the only thing we can do — voluntary with- drawal from a position everywhere questioned and misunderstood." The message ended with an enigmatic sentence generally interpreted as re- ferring to the Mexican difficulty, in which the President declared that if repeal was not granted 10 146 PRESIDENT WILSON '* I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence." It is a striking tribute to the force of the President's personality that his appeal for action running counter to the judgment of a substantial section, and to the sentiment of a much more substantial section, of the American people should have proved immediately effective. The divisions in the two Houses produced a good deal of cross- voting, Mr. Underwood and a number of Democrats opposing the measure, while Senator Lodge and several other Republicans supported it. The Bill was passed by the House by 247 votes to 162, and by the Senate by 50 to 35. It was signed by the President in June 19 14. Two other minor measures concerning Panama revealed in the President the same desire for straight dealing that he liad evinced in the matter of the tolls. The original owner of the Panama Canal zone was Colombia, and it was while Presi- dent Roosevelt was actually negotiating with Colombia for its acquisition that an opportune revolution in the Panama area enabled him to abandon the deal with the larger republic and purchase the Canal rights from the insurgent population then organizing itself as the State of Panama. The revolution proved of the highest benefit to the United States, but Mr. Roosevelt's attitude towards Colombia was emphatically con- demned by a section of his own countrymen — and as emphatically defended by the President himself and his partisans. Colombia present&d FOREIGN POLICY 147 various demands to the United States, the most tangible a claim for the payment of $10,000,000, which had not been met when Mr. Wilson came into office. Consistently with his views on Pan- American union, he held that the United States could and should afford to be generous rather than rigidly just in its relations with a small Latin republic, and he proposed the payment to Colombia of $25,000,000 in settlement of all claims. A treaty on that basis was approved by the Senate in 191 6, but is not yet ' ratified. -;V^s-** A somewhat similar arrangement was effected with Nicaragua, which possessed a rival canal route. By an incomprehensible departure from the President's consistent principles a Bill was presented by Mr. Bryan in 19 13 which would have practically established a United States pro- tectorate over Nicaragua. It failed to pass the Senate, and in 1 9 1 6 a treaty on much more reasonable lines, securing to the United States a naval base on the Nicaraguan coast and an option on the canal route in consideration of a payment of $3,000,000 to Nicaragua, was signed and ratified. The initial object of both these transactions was to provide against the acquisi- tion of rival canal routes by any extra -American Power ; but the spirit in which they were nego- tiated made effectively for the restoration of good- will between the United States and two weak but suspicious Latin republics. A similar anxiety for the prosperity of the Panama Canal led in 1 91 6 to the acquisition on purely strategic ' January 1917. 148 PRESIDENT WILSON grounds of the Danish West Indies, which lay within strilcing distance of the Canal in the Caribbean Sea. Their purchase had been under n^egotiation on various occasions from the time of the Civil War onwards. Two other particular problems, immigration re- strictions and Philippine independence, and one general, the negotiation of peace treaties with all Powers prepared to accept them, occupied the attention of the State Department during Mr. Wilson's first Administration. The immigration question caused him much personal anxiety. Asiatic immigration on the Pacific slope was always a fruitful source of friction, and in 1 9 1 3 matters were brought to a head by the introduc- tion into the Californian legislature of a Bill prohibiting aliens ineligible for citizenship of the United States from holding land in the State. This provision was manifestly aimed at the Japanese fruit -planters settled in California, and it provoked forcible protests on the part of the Japanese Ambassador. The Bill passed the Californian Lower House by a large majority, and despite a personal appeal from Mr. Wilson, and a conference between the State Government and Mr. Bryan, whom the President sent West to try and stop the Bill, it was passed by the Senate and signed by the Governor. During its discussion an amendment was inserted which saved the measure from actually infringing exist- ing treaties with Japan (in which case the Supreme Court might have invalidated it), but left the Act provocative and offensive to th« FOREIGN POLICY 149 fruit-growers themselves, their Ambassador, and their Government. The immigration problem confronted the Presi- dent at Washington as well as in California. In 1 9 14 two measures were introduced into Con- gress, one a general Immigration Bill, the other a Japanese Exclusion Bill. The latter was shelved through Mr. Wilson's influence, but the former was proceeded with and eventually passed by both Houses. Apart from codifying clauses, the measure provided for the exclusion of African negroes and imposed a literacy test which the President considered would involve harsh and un- just discrimination against a large class of immi- grants, including political refugees, whom America had readily admitted in the past and whom she should be prepared to welcome still. Accordingly he made this one of the rare occasions for exer- cising his Presidential veto, and the Bill in con- sequence lapsed. It was, however, reintroduced in the following session in a form even more antagonistic to the President's views, and passed the Senate by an overwhelming majority (64 votes to 7). In January 191 7 it once again came before the President for his assent, and once again that assent was refused. Japan was indirectly involved in another ques- tion which has caused and will cause some embarrassment to succeeding administrations at Washington. The Philippine Islands, like Cuba and Porto Rico, passed from Spanish control to American after the war of 1898, but conditions in the two cases were entirely different, in that ISO PRESIDENT WILSON the Philippines lay some four thousand miles from the shores of America. Therein lay the crux of the Philippine problem. The islands could not be defended if the United States should ever find itself involved in a war with a naval Power. Interest, therefore, confirmed the conclusion which sentiment dictated, that they should be relin- quished at the earliest possible moment. That, however, was no simple matter. Spanish adminis- tration had been such as to rule out any idea of a restoration of the Philippines to Spain. At the same time, civil war in the islands had been with difficulty suppressed by American troops, and a further outbreak was certain if the United States forces were withdrawn. There was equally strong objection to leaving the Philippines defenceless within the orbit of the expanding empire of Japan . The Democratic platform had demanded, and President Wilson identified himself with the demand, that the Philippine Islands should be given their independence as soon as they were deemed capable of managing their own affairs, and that the neutralization of the group should if possible be secured by international agreement. Though Mr. Taft, who had been the first Governor -General of the Philippines, asserted that the islands would not be ready for self-govern- ment for fifty years, Mr. Wilson, in his message to Congress in December 19 14, urged the passage of a measure granting a fuller degree of autonomy and pointing towards early independence. A Bill embodying this principle became law in August FOREIGN POLICY 151 191 6. It substituted for the nominated " Philip- pine Commission " an elected Senate of twenty- four ; and for the existing Assembly a House of Representatives of ninety. It generally enlarged the powers of the Insular Government, and put on record the purpose of the United States "to with- draw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands and to recognize their independence as soon as a stable government can be established therein." Throughout his administration Mr. Wilson had given unmistakable proof of his desire that the nation should so far as might be live at peace with all men. He was resolutely opposed to all aggressive action, and in his speech at Mobile in October 191 3 he had specifically pledged the United States against any annexation of alien territory. In all controversies that had arisen with foreign Powers it had been his fixed prin- ciple, maintained in the face of heated criticism, to subordinate the interests of his own coimtry to what he considered to be the dictates of justice, or the needs of some larger policy look- ing beyond the immediate issue. The Panama Tolls Bill, the proposal for compensation to Colombia, and in some degree the Mexican policy, are cases in point. But apart from negotiations on specific ques- tions Mr. Wilson worked assiduously at measures designed to consolidate and perpetuate the pacific relations of the United States with the rest of the world. He had inherited from the preceding administration the principle of the so-called " cooling-off " treaties, under which the signa- 152 PRESIDENT WILSON tory nations undertake to submit to an inter- national commission all disputes not covered by- existing arbitration treaties, and to refrain from hostile action for a year, or such shorter time as may suffice for the commission to reach a decision. It was, however, during Mr. Wilson's Presidency that the treaties were actually carried through. During 19 14, 191 5, and 19 16 treaties were definitely ratified with Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Spain, the three Scandi- navian Powers, China, and most of the Latin - American Republics. The terms of the treaties are not beyond criticism, for the interval of a year, valuable as its " cooling -off " effects may be, might give scope for the unhindered continuance of the very offences of commission or default that were the subject of dispute. None the less, the contrac- tion of treaties with so many foreign Govern- ments evidenced a growing faith in the principle of arbitration and discussion, and in the case of Latin America in particular the ratification lof the treaties was well calculated to open the way to the adoption of the larger policy outlined in the early part of this chapter. CHAPTER IX THE EUROPEAN WAR The people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy and desire among them with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle. It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it- Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility — responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country and whose loyalty to its Govern- ment should unite them as Americans all, bound in honour and affec- tion to think first of her and of her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action. Such divisions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind, and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommoda- tion, not as a partisan but as a friend. — Address to the American Pcot>le, August, 1914. The unlooked-for outbreak of the European War in August 1 91 4 added immeasurably to Mr. Wilson's burdens. He was weighed down at the time by a great personal anxiety, his wife being in the first week of August laid on her death- bed at the White House. Mexican affairs were at a critical stage, for though Huerta had just taken ship for Europe the effects of his abdica- tion were not yet revealed, and American troops were still in possession at Vera Cruz. The Presi- 153 154 PRESIDENT WILSON dent well knew, moreover, that though America might avoid actual participation in the war she could not fail to be directly and gravely affected by its reactions, and time and energies that should have been concentrated on programmes of domestic reform must of necessity be largely devoted to the negotiation of delicate problems of foreign policy. There was at the outset no serious question of American intervention in the war. When England took the fateful decision on August 4th the mean- ing of the sudden breaking of the storm of con- flict had hardly been grasped in the Western hemisphere. The documents published later in the official Blue Books and White Books and Red Books were not available ; only Belgium's neutrality, and not her women, had as yet been violated ; and though the direction of American sympathies might be clear^ American judgment was at first held for the most part in suspense. A tremendous responsibility was laid on Presi- dent Wilson. Political tradition and the letter of the Constitution make the President of the United States both a leader and an interpreter of the people, and it rests with the individual to lay predominant emphasis on whichever he will of the two heads of his Presidential duty. Woodrow Wilson had for seventeen months played the r61e of leader, and the nation accordingly looked to him with the greater expectancy in the crisis of August 1914- In shaping his course at such a juncture he was bound to take cognizance of certain indisputable facts. Tem- THE EUROPEAN WAR 155 peramentally and by tradition the American people was essentially paciiic. Its first Presi- dent had warned it against foreign entanglements, and the Monroe Doctrine had served as a permanent proclamation of benevolent isolation. Apart from the tearless war with Spain in 1898, America had not for over a century fought an external campaign, and she had virtually no dependencies to draw her into controversy Avith any European Power. And while she had a serviceable Navy, her Army was organized on a scale which forbade all thought of early participa- tion in a serious land campaign. But there were more cogent reasons than these why America should in 1 9 1 4 cling instinctively to her traditional policy of isolation. Though Washington had fought to make America inde- pendent and Lincoln had fought to keep her united, Mr. Wilson, fifty years after Lincoln's battles and a hundred and thirty after Washing- ton's, found himself President of what was not yet a cohesive nation. The census of 19 10 showed that the United States contained over four million Germans and Austro -Hungarians who were actually foreign-born, while there were close on nine millions of Germans alone returned as of foreign parentage. The danger that war against Germany would mean civil war needed no demonstration. Of war with the Entente Powers there was no serious prospect. There was not, it is true, in America that enthusiasm for Great Britain that some exponents of the unity of the Anglo-Saxon 156 PRESIDENT WILSON race too confidently assume. The large Irish section of the population was ill-disposed towards England, and throughout the war the strongest bond of transatlantic sympathy has been between America and France. Between Americans and Englishmen there had grown up that curious relationship sometimes established between two men who, knowing they will never go as far as a serious quarrel, can afford to be perpetually irritating one another. So far had that tendency been carried that it was possible recently for one of the most thoughtful of American reviews, in its anxiety for an Anglo-American under- standing, to solicit help from " the two peoples who will find their security in such understanding, the two peoples most able to mediate, the people of Canada and the people of France." ' Another fact to be remembered is that prior to the war there was in America no feeling against Germany and considerable feeling against Russia. Even now we are prone in this country, and in the later months of 1914 we were much m.ore prone, to judge America by the Eastern States. For that our Press is largely to blame. Nine quotations out of ten cabled across from American journals are taken from New York papers, with an occasional reference to the Philadelphia Ledger, or the Boston Transcript, or the Spring- field Republican. From west of the Alleghanies not a voice reaches us, unless it be a rare citation from the Chicago Daily News, or Herald, and the very names of powerful organs like the ' The Neiu Republic^ December 9, 1916. THE EUROPEAN WAR 157 Kansas City Star, or the St. Louis Globe-Demo- crat, or the Detroit Free Press are unknown out- side Fleet Street. It is not surprising therefore, though it is on many grounds unfortunate, that Englishmen have failed throughout to realize that in the West and Middle West the European War has never yet become, as it has in New England, the first preoccupation in the public mind.i The West is still an undeveloped_ country, and all it asks is to be left to its business of working out its own great destiny. That view is short-sighted and limited, no doubt. It takes no account, for example, of the function of the British Fleet as a shield of the Monroe Doctrine. But it is not wholly selfish. The West is not concerned merely with the accumulation of dollars. Mr. Henry Ford, the so-called pacifist fanatic, has built up at Detroit a business in which commercial pros- perity is combined with some of the best indus- trial conditions in America. As a Chicago correspondent of The Times recently pointed out in an instructive article,^ the West has ideals, social, industrial, municipal, to the realization of which both the principle and the fact of war are essentially antagonistic. It fears and hates war for reasons that demand respect. These are con- siderations that must be reckoned with. If many of them were lost— and pardonably lost — on the average Englishman, none of them was lost on Mr. Wilson, who never allowed himself to forget that he was President of the West as well as of the East. ' Written in 1916. The Tiines December 14, J916. 158 PRESIDENT WILSON From the first the President interpreted the neutrality of the United States as requiring an attitude of the most scrupulous — as it has some- times appeared on this side of the Atlantic, the most excessive — detachment on the part of its constitutional head. On August 4th he issued a formal proclaixiation of the neutrality of the United States ; on August 5th, twenty -four hours before the death of his wife, he circulated to all the belligerents a Note expressing his readiness to act as mediator at any future time when oppor- tunity might offer ; and on August 14th he emphasized the necessity for true neutrality in an address the salient passages of which stand at the head of this chapter. He foresaw from the first day of war that America was facing a crisis. Millions of her polyglot population would be torn by conflicting loyalties. British and Germans, Belgians and Hungarians, Poles and Finns — would they in the moment of testing prove false or true to the country of their new allegiance ? If his appeal to every American to put America first were effective, out of the ordeal new and potent bonds of union would be forged. If it failed, the peril of disintegration was imminent. None the less, the call to Americans to show themselves " impartial in thought as well as in action," and the warning against indicating " a preference of one party to the struggle before another," were too much for a large section of opinion in the United States, though the more moderate of the President's critics recognized that THE EUROPEAN WAR 159 whatever might be thought of his words his address was dictated by nobler motives than a mere negative desire to avoid entanglement in the war. Rightly or wrongly, he looked forward to the part that America as the greatest neutral Power might at some time be called to play as mediator, and he believed that the one hope of discharging that high function with success was to preserve in the meantime what was bound to be characterized in many quarters as an attitude of exaggerated and unworthy detachment. President Wilson can have been under no illu- sions as to what the policy he had chosen would involve. For him personally it would in many respects have been the easiest course to commit his country to intervention forthwith. That de- cision would at least have saved him from entanglement in the endless series of perilous complications arising out of the German sub- marine campaign, the British blockade, the machinations of German agents in America, and the abuse by belligerents of the laws of war and of humanity. It was soon made impossible for America to remain neutral in spirit, whatever she might be in act. The outrages in Belgium, verified as they were by the Bryce Commission, whose Chair- man was known and honoured above all other living Englishmen in America, threw a new light on the meaning of the war. The United States was not a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, but she was a signatory to the Hague Conventions of 1907, whose provisions Germany had ruthlessly i6o PRESIDENT WILSON and cynically flung to the winds under the impulse of a military necessity that knew no law. The world turned instinctively to the great neutral Republic for the word of judicial protest and condemnation that her part in the violated Con- vention gave her a legal title as well as an unassailable moral right to utter. That word was not spoken. America has earned the undying gratitude of Belgium for the unstinted generosity with which her citizens have provided and her agents administered the relief that has kept millions of Belgians from starva- tion. But it was not till more than two years of war had passed — when Germany was crown- ing her crimes by deporting the civil population of Belgium to work in German factories and mines — that an official protest against the martyrdom of that unhappy nation was for the first time voiced by the spokesman and leader of the American people. Mr. Wilson's silence was no doubt dictated by his fear of being driven, so early in the war, into a position of apparent partisanship, and it is fair to him to add that the most embittered opponent of his policy, Mr. Roosevelt, at this .point shared his views. " Sympathy " [with Belgium], wrote the ex -President, " is compat- ible with full acknowledgment of the unwisdom of our uttering a single word of official protest unless we are prepared to make that protest effec- tive ; and only the clearest and most urgent national duty would ever justify us in deviating from our rule of neutrality and non -inter- THE EUROPEAN WAR i6l ference." ' Great Britain and France — which, it may be objected, are not entirely unbiased judge? —have found full comprehension of that attitude beyond them. In view of the gravity of the protracted con- troversies between America and Germany on the conduct of naval warfare, it is of some importance to recall that the first Note of protest drafted at Washington was addressed, not to the Wilhelm- strasse but to Downing Street. It was distinctly friendly in character, but expressed America's perplexity and concern at the new rules of war at sea formulated by the Allied Governments. Full justice has hardly been done to the difficulty of Mr. Wilson's position in his negotiations with this country over the interference with American overseas trade. Soon after the beginning of the war the Declaration of London began to be jetti- soned bit by bit, and faced with the fact that a port like Rotterdam or Flushing constituted for commercial purposes practically the mouth of Germany, the Allies undeniably worked the recognized doctrine of continuous voyage and ultimate destination very hard. Early in 191 5, moreover, a series of moves took place that laid American commerce imder grave disabilities. Germany established Govern- ment control of practically all food supplies ; Great Britain thereupon declared all food con- traband ; Germany replied by announcing a blockade of Britain as from March 1 8th ; and Britain retaliated by Orders in Council proclaim- ' In the Outlook, September 23, 1914. II 152 PRESIDENT WILSON ing a blockade of Germany, under which the right was reserved to the British Navy to detain and take into port " ships carrying goods of pre- sumed enemy destination, ownership, or origin." The result of these successive declarations was to supersede the old laws of the sea as commonly understood in favour of a new code, which, as America contended, had the validity only of a municipal law of an individual belligerent and could not be substituted for the recognized canons of international law. The real difficulty was not that a departure had been made from established custom, — America, like every other nation, realized that the advent of the submarine had introduced a factor sub- versive of all accepted rules, — but that by the middle of 1 9 1 5 or earlier a neutral had come to feel that the arbitrary proclamations of the different belligerents had left him with no solid ground beneath his feet. In the case of Great Britain American irritation at the delays atten- dant on the examination of cargoes in port instead of on the high seas was accentuated by the censors' interference with mails — to which merchants more than once attributed (apparently without much justice) the loss of important orders. On our side there was some disposition to ride off too lightly on the plea that while we were merely delaying American cargoes Germany, was murdering American sailors. That was true, and America recognized that it was true ; but President Wilson had always insisted on the sound principle that he was discussing business only THE EUROPEAN WAR 163 with the particular Power concerned, and, as he twice reminded Germany in forcible words, there could be no question of playing ofif one belligerent against the other. It would have smoothed some rough places if more regard had been paid in this country to a judgment of that shrewd and able diplomatist Lord Lyons, who wrote ifrom the Embassy at Washington fifty years ago : •, " The Americans, both Government and People, \ are I .tTiink much pleased by attentions and civili- \ ties, and very prone to think themselves slighted. \ This quality may be sometimes turned to good ; account, and should certainly be borne in mind when it is necessary to keep them in good humour." ' As it was, speakers and writers were, with individual exceptions, at no particular pains to consider American susceptibilities, and there was considerable surprise when in November 1 9 1 5 a Note couched in language of marked acerbity was handed by the American Ambassador to Sir Edward Grey. The phraseology, there is reason for believing, was the work of Mr. Lansing, not of President Wilson, and it was strongly depre- cated in some sections of the American Press. Here it was generally assumed to be in some measure a studied counterweight to the grave communications the President was finding it necessary to address to Germany, and a detailed reply by Sir Edward Grey, oiTering explanations, and conceding some modifications, of the pro- cedure to which objection was taken, averted any ' Lord Lyons f by Lord Newton, chap. ii. 1 64 PRESIDENT WILSON danger of increased friction between the two countries. Some fresh resentment was occasioned in the summer of 1916 by the action of the British Foreign Ofhce in forbidding British traders to do business with certain specified American firms, set out in a " black list," which were in the ordinary way of commerce giving assistance to the enemy ; but here again a reasoned explanation by Sir Edward Grey greatly reduced the tension, and no serious or permanent strain was laid on Anglo-American relations. President Wilson's attitude in all these con- troversies has been scrupulously correct. While not prepared to disregard what he held to be undue invasions of the rights of American shippers, he has throughout the negotiations with this country preserved a just sense of propor- tion, and firmly refused to allow his differences of opinion with Great Britain to be exploited by friends of Germany in America. But the President had more anxious negotia- tions than these upon his hands. While he was suing Great Britain for trespass he was called on to prosecute Germany for murder. The original announcement of Berlin (in February 191 5) that the waters round the British Isles were to be considered as a " war zone," into which neutrals would venture at their peril, had been received in America with resentment and concern, and a Note was immediately dispatched warning the German Government that if American vessels, or the lives of American citizens, should THE EUROPEAN WAR 165 be lost " the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial Government of Germany to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities." The spring of 191 5 was a time of acute anxiety for the President. While he was being daily assailed with protests from American traders at British interference with their commerce, he feared to learn at any moment of a German outrage which would bring the '* strict accountability " clause of his recent Note into iplay. His apprehensions were soon realized. It is impossible to follow in detail the procession of shelled or torpedoed ships — the Falaba, the Cash- ing, the Gulflight, and the rest — ^across the diplo- matic stage. It will be sufficient here to recall briefly the leading cases, the Liisitanla, the Arabic, the Hespeace. Encouraged, it can hardly be questioned, by these endorsements of the principles of the League to Enforce Peace, the President dwelt in his so- called Peace Note to the belligerents in December 1916 on "the measures to be taken to secure ihe future peace of the world," a matter in which, he declared, the people and Government of the United States were vitally and directly interested, and in which they were ready, and even eager, to co-operate when the war was over with every influence and resource at their command. That declaration, being" incidental rather than essential to the main purpose of Mr. Wilson's Note, might well have been passed over without specific refer- ence in the replies of the belligerents. It was therefore the more notable that both groups directly responded to the suggestion thus tenta- tively advanced, Germany professing herself pre- pared to collaborate fully after the end of the conflict then in progress in the exalted task the President had outlined, while the Allies declared that " they associate themselves whole-heartedly with the plan of creating a League of the Nations to ensure peace and justice throughout the world." What fruit those seeds of agreement will bear only the future can show. Mr. Wilson was not the originator of the PREPAREDNESS AND PEACE 211 League to Enforce Peace, but his advocacy of its programme both in his Washington speech in May and in his Note to the belligterents in December 1 9 1 6 had the effect of commending the League's proposals to political thinkers the world over. The difficulties such a scheme would in- evitably have to meet cannot be considered here, except in one aspect that particularly concerns America. Critics of President Wilson and of the League to Enforce Peace have pointed out, and with undeniable force, that the participation of the United States in such a League of Nations would be fundamentally inconsistent both with the Monroe Doctrine and with the American Constitution . The Monroe Doctrine is certainly no fatal obstacle. That article of political faith is being progressively modified under the influence of changing circumstances, and it is destined to be modified further still. The Constitutional objection is more serious. Under the provisions of the Constitution the President has a free hand in all ordinary diplomatic negotiations, but he needs the concurrence of the Senate for the rati- fication of a treaty, while the declaration of w*a!r rests with Congress alone. How, then, could he pledge himself in advance to enter into the treaty relations on which the League's very existence would depend? And how could he guarantee the co-operation of the armed forces of the United States in the exercise of military pressure on a recalcitrant member of the League ? These are questions that must be seriously 312 PRESIDENT WILSON faced, for America does not lightly relax her constitutional safeguards. They are not likely to form permanent or insuperable obstacles to the participation of the United States in a League of Nations. Americans have too strong a sense of their role as international mediators for that. But they may well provide American opponents of the League with the means of seriously delaying and obstructing the realization of its ideals. CHAPTER XI LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM It is time that property, as compared with humanity, should take second place, not first place. We must see to it that there is no overcrowding, that there is no bad sanitation, that there is no un- necessary spread of avoidable diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, that there is every precaution against accident, that women are not driven to impossible tasks, nor children permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be spent. The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved ; men must be preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the programmes of in- dustry merely. What is the use of having industry, if we perish in producing it ? If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should we eat ? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the crowd trample us sooner and be done with it? — The New Freedom, chap. xi. Every quality in Mr. Wilson's character made him a social reformer. He was a social reformer as Governor of New Jersey, and he was elected President of the United States in 1 9 1 2 on a social reform programme. With organized labour he had temperamentally great sympathy, but down to his entry into New Jersey politics he had come into little actual contact with Labour as a political and social force. His attitude on Labour questions had been defined as far back as 19 10, when he was still President of Princeton, in a letter affirming that "it is not only perfectly legitimate, but abso- lutely necessary, that labour should organize if 214 PRESIDENT WILSON it is to secure justice from organized capital, and everything that it does to improve the con- dition of working-men, to obtain legislation that will impose full legal responsibility upon the employer for his treatment of his employees and for their protection against accident, to secure just and adequate wages, and to put reasonable limits upon the working day and upon the exac- tions of those who employ labour, ought to have the hearty support of all fair-minded and public- spirited men." Mr. Wilson has not varied from that attitude during the years that have intervened ; but it is a much less simple matter to handle labour problems from the White House than from the State House at Trenton. All questions of factory laws, industrial disputes, wage rates, compensa- tion for accidents, and the like fall within the sphere of the State legislatures, not of the Federal Government. The only legislative power to be assumed by Congress is such as can be squared with clause 3 of section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, giving it authority " to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." The words " among the several States " are driven hard. They at once bring every con- siderable railway under Federal regulation ; and while Congress can do nothing to influence con- ditions of employment in a factory doing business exclusively within its own State,' it gets some ' This principle was definitely confirmed by the leading case U.S. sy. E. C. Knight, heard before the Supreme Court in 1895. LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 215 hold by prohibiting the transport of its goods in interstate commerce unless the conditions lof their manufacture have conformed to prescribed standards . Much of the work of the Supreme Court has consisted of deciding on the constitu- tionality of Federal laws challenged by the States as an encroachment on their rights. To that standing difficulty was added the fact that in America, as elsewhere, problems arising out of the European War absorbed time and attention which both Cabinet and Congress would have desired to devote to domestic legislation. In spite of that the Wilson Administration has carried through a striking list of measures bear- ing on social and industrial questions. And in almost every case the President's share in their initiation or successful passage has been large. His relations with Labour have not been uniformly smooth. As is usual in times of industrial pros- perity, there has been much industrial unrest, and one or two serious deadlocks, since Mr. Wilson's advent to power in 1 9 1 3 . The great textile strike, organized at Lawrence, in Massachusetts, by the Industrial Workers of the World (the un- skilled labourers' federation), fell in his prede- cessor's term of office ; but soon after his election there was a serious difficulty among the weavers at Paterson, in the President's own State of New Jersey, and in 1914 a grave outbreak took place at the Standard Oil Company's mines in Colorado. The issue was the recognition of union officials and the employment of non-union labour, and after a serious aflfray between the 2i6 PRESIDENT WILSON strikers and the State militia, Mr. Wilson was compelled to draft Federal troops into the State. The dispute was finally settled by a Commission of Investigation, appointed by the President, when all other attempts at a settlement had failed. There was fortunately no other disturbance of the magnitude of the Colorado outbreak, though the railway troubles of 1916 threatened to put that and every other industrial conflict of recent times in the shade. Meanwhile President Wilson had been proving the sincerity of his promises of social legislation. Of the three great measures passed during his first year of office all had an indirect bearing on the welfare of Labour. The Federal Reserve Act by distributing credit stabi- lized trade, and therefore employment ; the Underwood Tariff Act lowered the price of staple commodities, like sugar, to the poor ; and the Clayton Anti -Trust Act in certain important par- ticulars constituted a charter for Labour com- parable to the Trade Disputes Act in Great Britain. The Clayton Act, which owed its passage into law to the pressure exerted personally by the President at a critical stage, expressly exempted labour unions from the veto on " combinations in restraint of trade." The unions had suffered much from the rulings of the courts. The Sherman Anti-Trust Law, of 1890, had not been aimed at Labour ; but decisions of the Supreme Court in 1908 and 191 1 had brought trade unions definitely under it. The clauses in the Clayton Act, legalizing peaceful strikes and boy- LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 217 cotts, were the response to urgent demands of Labour for relief from the impossible position in which the Sherman Act had placed it. The same measure severely limited the power of the courts to restrict the action of unions by injunc- tions prohibiting the continuance of practices forming the subject of an impending action. It was not without reason that Mr. Wilson sent the pen with which he signed the Act as a memento to Mr. Samuel Gompers^ the President of the American Federation of Labour. Labour legislation rarely enjoys a smootn passage. It almost invariably produces a clash of interests, and long after the law has been enacted and put in force opinion will still remain sharply divided as to its value. That was par- ticularly true of two measures passed by the Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Congresses, the Sea- men's Act and the Adamson Railway Act. The Adamson Act must be considered later. The Seamen's Act, introduced by Senator La Follette, one of the founders of the Progressive Party, was dictated partly by alarm at the Titanic disaster, and partly by the demand of the seamen's unions for better conditions of service. The effect of the Act was to establish the sailor's right to at least half wages within forty -eight hours of making an American port, and to abolish arrests for desertion ; while it was laid down at the same time that after a specified interval 65 per cent, of the deck hands of any vessel calling at an American port must be able seamen, and 75 per cent, of the crew must be able to under- 2i8 PRESIDENT WILSON stand any order in the language in which it i« given. The Bill, which involved the denuncia- tion of treaties with more than twenty nations, was strongly opposed by the Republicans, and it was fully expected that the President would veto it, in view of the opposition at home and the irritation abroad. He decided, however, that the case was not one for opposing the decision of Congress. The passage of the Act was loudly applauded by the Seamen's Union. The hostility of foreign Governments to the measure iwould no doubt have been more vigorously expressed if the war had not intervened to thrust lesser concerns into the background. Two much less contentious measures, which owed their passage directly to the President's interest in their fortunes, were the Rural Credits Act and the Federal Child Labour Act. The Rural Credits Act, the purpose of which is suffi- ciently explained by its title, was the fulfilment of an old debt to the farmers. It had had a place in the Democratic platform of 1912, and Mr. Wilson had given it his strong personal support. The measure, more often known as the Federal Farm Loan Act, created a Federal Farm Loan Board and provided for the establishment of Federal Land Banks in twelve centres throughout the Union. The machinery bears a close re- semblance to that of the Federal Reserve Board, which had already done something to facilitate agricultural development. The Act, as President Wilson reminded the farmers in whose presence he set his signature to it, made the credit of the LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 219 L^nited States available to them and gave them the same facilities for raising loans as were always open to any city manufacturer and merchant with genuine assets to pledge. The Child Labour Act was the first measure of the kind passed by Congress. Social reforms such as it embodied had in the past been left to the individual States, and the power of the Federal Government to legislate for the whole Union on such a question was a matter of con- troversy. As it is, the constitutionality of the Child Labour Act is certain to be challeng'ed before the Supreme Court. The provisions of the Act are simple. It prohibits the shipment in inter-state commerce of goods emanating from factories employing children under fourteen, or under sixteen if employed at night or for more than eight hours a day. The measure had no easy passage. The first time it was introduced it was allowed to lapse. Brought in again in the following session, it would have met with no better fate but for Mr. Wilson's -determination that it should be saved. At the critical stage, when the approaching end of the session threatened a general disaster to all outstanding Bills, the President sent for the party leaders and urged them to insist on the passage of the Child Labour Act. His appeal was successful. The Senate passed the measure by 52 votes to 12, and it was signed on September i, 191 6. It was to come into operation twelve months later. It was left to the threatened railv/ay strike of 191 6 to involve Mr. Wilson in the most decisive 2 20 PRESIDENT WILSON action he ever took with regard to a Labour problem. This was not the President's first ex- perience of railway trouble. Within a few months after his election in 191 3 a strike seemed im- pending, the then existing arbitration machinery — a Commission of three created by the Erdman Act of 1898 — satisfying neither side in the dispute, since each party feared that a single vote might deprive them of an award involving some millions of dollars. In this case prompt legis- lative action was taken. A Bill, acceptable to both employers and employed, providing for the increase of the Arbitration Board to six, was rushed through Congress and signed by the Presi- dent. On the basis thus provided the dispute was settled without open hostilities. The 191 6 trouble was much more formidable. It involved the skilled men of every railway system in the United States. The men were represented by four railway brotherhoods ' (trade unions), their actual number being less than 400,000, distributed over some 230 railways, from Philadelphia to San Francisco and from Detroit to New Orleans. Moderate as these numbers were, the threatened strike would have paralysed the railway service of the whole of the Union, for the prospective strikers were the skilled men— engineers, firemen, conductors, brakemen — on whom the actual train -running depended, and they were backed by the promised support of the American Federation of Labour. Stripped of certain technicalities, their demand - Locomotive engineers, locomotive firemen, conductors, trainmen. LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 221 was for an eight -hour day (instead of the usual nine or ten\ without reduction of wages and with payment at time and a half for overtime. In the words of a poster issued broadcast through- out the country, they asked for " a square deal — eight hours' work, eight hours' sleep, eight hours' relaxation." The case for the companies was that the men's demands were unreasonable, and that to concede them would mean so heavy an addition to working costs as to neces- sitate the raising of rates, a step which the railroads were not empowered to take without the sanction of the Inter-State Commerce Com- mission . The men refused arbitration and definitely called a strike, to take effect on the first Monday in September if their demands had not been met by that date. The Monday in question was the fourth of the month . A week earlier there was no sign of a settlement. The railroads were refusing all goods for future transport, and pre- parations were being made to have the mail trains worked by the military. A heavy responsibility rested on the President as Chief Executive. The deadlock was complete. Every possible opening for intervention had disappeared. Unless the men got what they asked for the train services would stop dead in seven days' time. Mr. Wilson was not predisposed to condemn the brotherhoods as imreasonable. He was a believer in the limita- tion of hours, and a Bill fixing an eight-hour day for Federal employees had recently been passed with his approval . But to rush through 222 PRESIDENT WILSON legislation conferring on the men by statute satis- faction of demands they had refused to submit to arbitration was a serious step, which could not fail to expose its author to violent attack. But it was a choice between that and a national strike. The President was faced with an extra- ordinarily difficult decision, and he decided for legislation. On Tuesday, August 29th, he went down to Congress and appealed for the immediate passage of a Bill whose provisions he outlined. It consisted of six clauses, enacting — 1 . That the Inter-State Commerce Commission (which regulates railways) should be reconstituted and strengthened. 2. That the eight-hour day should be estab- lished as the legal basis of work and wages. 3. That a Commission of three should be appointed to watch the working of the Act and report . 4. That the companies should be permitted to raise rates if the Inter -State Commerce Com- mission decided that the increased costs imposed by the new Act justified it. 5 . That a strike or lock-out should be illegal until a public investigation had been made into the dispute. 6. That in case of military necessity the Presi- dent should have power to seize and work the railways, putting the railwaymen under military discipline. The lengthy address by which these proposals were prefaced provoked much criticism ; for the President contrived to put the masters, rather than LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 223 the men, in the wrong, on the ground that they had definitely rejected his plan of settlement, which involved just compensation in return for the concession of the eight-hour day. But the urgency of the situation demanded action rather than criticism. Congress, warned that starva- tion was among the possibilities, applied itself forthwith to its task. There was some argu- ment as to the precise form and extent of the Bills to be passed ; but on Thursday, August 31st, it was announced that the President and the leaders in the two Houses had accepted as a compromise the measure standing in the name of Mr. Adamson, of Georgia, for intro- duction in the House. The Bill established the eight -hour day, with overtime pro rata (not at time and a half), appointed the Commission of three to observe and report, and provided for the military operation of the roads in case of need. The new provisions were to have force as from January i, 191 7. The Bill was intro- duced on Thursday, passed by the House on Friday and by the Senate on Saturday, and was signed by the President on Sunday. On Monday, the day fixed for the great strike, work every- where went on as usual. The rest of the Presi- dent's programme was held over till the following session. The settlement gratified the railwaymen and satisfied the President, and while Mr. Wilson was bitterly assailed for yielding to industrial menace, relief at the escape from the strike was clearly the predominant feeling in the mind of the 2 24 PRESIDENT WILSON average citizen. No one, however, supposed that the companies would accept the decision without a fight. Their obvious strategy was to challenge the Act as unconstitutional, and a number of railroads at once filed injunction suits to suspend its operation. On November 22nd the Federal District Court at Kansas City decided, on the application of the Missouri, Oklahoma, Gulf Rail- road, that the Law was unconstitutional. An in- junction was issued pending a final judgment on the issue by the Supreme Court. At the time this chapter was being written (February 191 7) that decision had not been given and the Law was not in operation. Public opinion on the President's action has not yet finally crystallized, nor is it likely to until the decision of the Inter-State Commerce Commission on the raising of freight rates is made known. If the Law should be declared constitutional and should indirectly mean a levy on the pocket of the private citizen, it will not be viewed with quite the detachment that was possible while the dispute was pending. The men, on their side, are strongly opposed to the measure of what is virtually compulsory arbitra- tion associated by the President with his pro- posal to make the eight -hour day statutory. The railway future therefore remains uncertain, the more so as the Newlands Commission, appointed to investigate and report on the working of rail- way systems the world over, must obviously bring the question of nationalization into the field of practical discussion. /vmerica is hardly pre- LABOUR AND SOCIAL REFORM 225 pared yet for a change involving a centralization of power that would affect the whole relationship of the States to the Union, but merely to have nationalization discussed as a serious proposition will be a portent of interest. Presenting himself for re-election within nine weeks of his settlement of the railroad dispute, Mr. Wilson commanded a substantial section of the Labour vote that would otherwise have gone to the Socialist candidate. In his speech of acceptance at the beginning of September he had given evidence of his solicitude for Labour in a passage recalling the legislation he had initiated or furthered. " The working-men of America," he claimed, " have been given a veritable emancipation by the legal recognition of a man's labour as part of his life, and not a mere marketable com- modity ; by exempting labour organizations from processes of the Courts which treated their mem- bers like fractional mobs and not like accessible and responsible individuals ; by releasing our seamen from involuntary servitude ; by making adequate provision for compensation for indus- trial accidents ; by providing suitable machinery for mediation and conciliation in industrial dis- putes ; and by putting the Federal Department of Labour at the disposal of the working-man when in search of work." To this list of services would, of course, have been added the eight- hour day victory, but for the fact that on the day the President's speech was being delivered the measure conferring that benefit IS 226 PRESIDENT WILSON was still in course of passage through the Senate. On the whole, Labour recognized the justice of President Wilson's claims. The union clauses in the Clayton Act they regarded as a vindication of the principle that " the labour of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce " — and may therefore be legitimately withheld through the action of a combination when a commodity or article of commerce may not. Mr. Gompers, the President of the A.F.L., no doubt carried most of his membership with him when he wrote on the eve of the 191 6 election : " Presi- dent Woodrow Wilson has advocated, urged, and signed legislation protecting human rights and promoting the welfare of the workers and all of the masses of the people. It lies with the working people — the masses — on Election Day to deter- mine by their votes whether the policy of progress, justice, freedom, and humanity shall prevail in the re-election of Mr. Wilson to the Presidency of the United States, or whether the pendulum shall swing backward, and the policy of reaction shall be enthroned." i It does not appear that the Labour vote was in most areas cast solid for the President, but it may well have been responsible for giving' him the victory in more than one doubtful State. ' American Federation! st, November 1916. CHAiPTER XII RE-ELECTION Four years is too long a term for a President who is not a true spokesman of the people, who is imposed upon and does not lead. It is too short a term for a President who is doing or attempting a great work of reform and who has not had time to finish it.— Letter to Congressman A. I\I. Palmer, February 191 3. From the end of 191 5, when political thought began seriously to concern itself with the Presi- dential Election of the following November, down to the actual day of assembly of the Progressive and Republican Conventions at Chicago in June, a curious and baffling situation prevailed. On the Democratic side, indeed, there was neither division nor doubt. Only one candidate was possible, Woodrow Wilson, and the 191 2 pro- nouncement in favour of a single Presidential term was by tacit agreement thrown to the winds. But with the opposition the case was very dif- ferent. They did not know whether they were one party or two, and even if they should decide to be one they were completely at a loss for a candidate. Half a dozen names were under discussion^ the mention of any one of them calculated to provoke more criticism than approval. Mr. Roosevelt was an obvious nomination, but public 2i7 228 PRESIDENT WILSON opinion was altogether against election for a third term, and in any case the Progressive leader's rampant radicalism would render his hold on the " old guard " of the Republican Party precarious. Senator Elihu Root commanded universal respect, but he was too conservative for many of the Pro- gressives, and it was doubtful in the extreme whether he was ready to accept nomination at seventy-one. On the whole, the omens pointed to the adoption of a compromise candidate in Mr. Charles Evans Hughes, one of the nine judges of the Supreme Court, and a former Governor of New York State ; but here again it was question- able whether Mr. Hughes was prepared to relin- quish the dignity and distinction of his high judicial office, and whether, if he did, he would make an effective fighting candidate. In addition attention was spasmodically concentrated on the claims of such " favourite son " candidates as Senator Cummins of Iowa, Senator Borah of Idaho, and ex -Senator Fairbanks of Indiana, Vice-President in Mr. Roosevelt's second administration. The importance of the Republican dilemma lay in the certainty that the presence of both a Pro- gressive and a Republican candidate in the field would, in 1 9 1 6 as in 1 9 1 2, mean the gift of the election to Mr. Wilson. On the other hand, in the event of a Progressive-Republican coalition the President would have to do much more than maintain his position. In 19 12 his total was 1,300,000 behind the combined polls of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft, and if in 1216 he should RE-ELECTION 229 be facing one opponent instead of two he would need to make up the leeway of a million and a third either by securing that majority among the new voters, largely women, added to the electorate in the preceding four years, or by detaching sufficient votes from the Opposition to reduce their total and increase his own to the necessary level. It is not surprising that the President's chances of re-election were generally assumed to turn on whether the cleavage in the Republican Party was to disappear or be perpetuated. In a straight fight the odds were against Mr. Wilson. The first five months of 19 16 passed with the Republican riddle still unsolved. When the Pro- gressive and Republican Conventions, opening at Chicago on June 7th, were no more than a week distant the more sagacious prophets were pre- dicting that Roosevelt would be nominated by the former and Hughes by the latter, though whether Hughes would consent to stand was altogether problematic. The first day of the Conventions brought no developments. On the second an important step was taken, five Progres- sives meeting with five Republicans to probe the possibilities of an accommodation. On the fourth Judge Hughes was nominated by the Republicans, and his acceptance was at once cabled from Washington. He resigned his seat in the Supreme Court on the same day. Mr. Roosevelt, nomi- nated simultaneously by the Prog'ressives, indi- cated that his acceptance would depend on the opinion he formed of Mr. Hughes's declarations. The Republican candidate having stated his posi- 230 PRESIDENT WILSON tion, the ex -President decided that rather than make Mr. Wilson's re-election certain he would stand aside himself and throw his weight on the side of Judge Hughes. The interest of the Democratic Convention at St. Louis a fortnight later lay not in the choice of a candidate, for that was a foregone conclu- sion, but in the formulation of a platform. The documents representing the views of the Republi- cans and the Progressives had been unimpressive, both demanding high Protection, both insisting on the vindication of American honour and interests, and both calhng for extensive prepared- ness programmes, the Progressives committing themselves to the advocacy of universal military service. The Democratic platform, in the drafting of which Mr. Wilson had taken a prominent part, consisted largely of a record of the notable achievements of the Administration in power. It reaffirmed the belief of the party in a revenue tariff ; made an outspoken appeal to American citizens of whatever origin to recognize the para- mount claims of their American nationality ; pledged the support of the party to the prepared- ness and Pan-American policies of the Adminis- tration ; approved the Shipping Bill then before Congress ; advocated the introduction of woman suffrage by the individual States ; and recom- mended various measures of social reform. The platform opened with the declaration that " we endorse the administration of Woodrow Wilson," and ended with the affirmation that " Woodrow Wilson stands to-day the greatest RE-ELECTION '231 American of his generation." That was the real plank on which the Democratic Party fouglit the election. Throughout the Union they placarded the legend, " Let us keep this proven man." No better war-cry could have been devised. An outgoing President presenting himself for re-election must stand primarily on his record, and in 19 16 Mr. Wilson's personaHty, as revealed by his legislative and administrative achievement, was the supreme — it might almost be said the single — campaign asset of the party that had nominated him for a second term. The times forbade the introduction of new and ambi- tious domestic programmes. Moreover, most of the standing demands of the Democrats had already been realized, at least in part, during the quadrennium then drawing* to a close. All they asked was that Woodrow Wilson should con- tinue to lead. They were prepared, not in blind but in assured confidence^ to follow. In the four and a half months of organizing and oratory that intervened between the nominations in June and the elections in November the attitude of America towards the European War was inevit- ably the main subject of contention. It did not overshadow all other issues as completely as was sometimes supposed in this country, but it pro- vided the Republicans with their main weapon of attack, and for that reason it was given a greater prominence in the campaign speeches than it assumed in the mind of the average voter in any except the Eastern States. New England, always Republican, was strongly opposed to what it 232 PRESIDENT WILSON regarded as the President's nerveless handling of the controversies with both groups of belligerents — particularly with Germany. But throughout the West and South and a great part of the Middle West there was a general endorsement of the appreciation accorded in the Democratic platform to " the splendid diplomatic victories of our great President, who has preserved the vital interests of our Government and its citizens, and kept us out of war." The nature of the pacific idealism of the West has already been briefly touched on,' and it is sufficient to say here that the watchword Peace and Prosperity, with its variant Peace, Pre- paredness, and Prosperity, was calculated to secure the Democratic candidate many thousands of votes throughout wide areas west of the Mississippi. The campaign was devoid of conspicuous inci- dents. From the first moment to the last the issue completely baffled the prophets. Much turned on whether the German vote would be cast solid, and if so which candidate would get it. At first Mr. Hughes was distinctly in favour with the hyphenates, partly from their natural disposition to oppose the man whom they regarded as backing' the Allies against Germany, partly as a result of the President's unsparing flagellation of so-called American citizens of divided allegiance, who put the interests of the country of their origin before the interests of the country to which their loyalty had been pledged. For a while Mr. Hughes, notably in a speech at the German centre of Milwaukee, appeared to be cultivating such sup.- » Chap, ix, p. 157. RE-ELECTION 233 port, but it soon became an embarrassment to him, and he took an early opportunity of defining his position by some uncompromising strictures on qualified and divided loyalty. As the campaign progressed the old party alignments, obliterated by the Progressive split in 191 2, took clearer shape. Mr. Roosevelt, after a rather spectacular reconcihation with his former opponent Mr. Taft, took the field in active support of Mr. Hughes. On the other side Mr. Bryan, whose influence with the radical and pacifist wing of the Democratic Party was great, had at the outset pledged his unreserved support to the Presi- dent, and the Democratic candidate's prospects were further improved towards the close of the campaign by the unexpected backing of Mr. Henry Ford, the pacifist and Republican motor-manu- facturer of Detroit, Mr. Thomas Edison, and the influential, but so far non-committal, New York Evening Post, The main line of Republican attack was a fierce condemnation of the alleged failure of the President to protect American honour and interests ; but Mr. Hughes showed himself singularly destitute of any practical alter- native policy, a defect that unquestionably, lost him the support of thousands of electors disposed to vote Republican but unprepared for a leap in the dark in a crisis so menacing. The quality of Mr. Wilson's patriotism, more- over, was above challenge. He refused from the first to truckle to the pro -German element, and his position was considerably strengthened by an incident that occurred just a month before the 234 PRESIDENT WILSON election. A body, of pro -German procliviries, known as the American Truth Society, sent him through its president, Mr. Jeremiah O'Leary, a telegram worded as follows : — Again we greet you with popular disapproval of your pro-British policies. Your failure to secure compliance with all American rights, your leniency towards the British Empire, your approval of war loans and ammunition traffic, are the issues of this campaign. The President immediately telegraphed back from his home at Long Branch ' : — Your telegram received. Would feel deeply mortified to have you, or anybody like you, voting for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans, and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them. — Woodrow Wilson. The interchange was received with general satis- faction throughout America. The beginning of November found the political pundits completely at sea. Never in the history of the Union had the issue seemed so incalculable. Certain early omens, it is true, had been unfavour- able to Mr. Wilson. Maine, which holds its State elections apart from, and in advance of, the Presi- dential contest, had in September shown itself true to its traditional Republicanism. In the New York primaries in the same month the Pro- gressives, for whose support the Democrats had been angling, went back to the Republican fold ; while in the President's own State of New Jersey there was a Democratic split, and an anti -Wilson candidate secured nomination at the primary for ' See map opposite p. 43. R^-ELECTION 235 the United States Senatorship, Nevertheless, Wall Street betting, which early in the campaign had been 2 to i on Hughes, had backed down by the last week in October to 10 to 9, and on the eve of the poll varied between 10 to 7 and 10 to 8 on the Republican candidate. The President's chances of success rested on too many unknown factors for confident predic- tion. How far would he detach Progressive votes from Hughes ? Or Socialist votes from Benson (the oflficial Socialist) ? Would he carry the Middle West ? How would the four million women vote — for the Democratic candidate who advocated extension of the franchise to them by State ordinance, or for the Republican who boldly recommended an amendment of the Federal Con- stitution conferring the vote on women at a stroke throughout the forty -eight States ? With those, and many other similar questions unanswered and unanswerable, the electors went to the poll on November 7th. The quarters where the earliest foreshadowings of the result were to be sought were well known. Pennsyl- vania, with its 38 electoral votes, was a certainty for Hughes. Its great steel industry lived on high Protection, and the State had never gone Democratic since the Civil War. If to Pennsyl- vania's 38 should be added New York's 45, Mr. Wilson's handicap would be heavy, even with the certainty that the South and the probability that much of the West would be with him. Illinois with its 29 votes was regarded as the pivotal State. If the Democrats could carry that they 236 PRESIDENT WILSON would have some set-off against their certain defeat in the East. If, on the other hand, Wilson lost Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois the election was as good as over. No candidate in the history of the Union had ever won against the combination of those three predominant States. By the early evening unofficial reports from the different States were reaching New York. It was soon clear that Pennsylvania was Repub- lican. By seven o'clock the Democratic New York Times had conceded New York to Mr. Hughes. By 7.30 the Herald had prematurely announced Mr. Hughes's election. An hour later the American did the same. The Illinois returns were still lacking, but a Republican majority was rumoured. By nine o'clock the Democratic World and the Republican Tribune had taken Mr. Hughes's victory for granted. By 9.30 the Times had hoisted the red light that was the pre- arranged signal of a Republican victory. It kept it burning till midnight, and announced the next morning in giant headlines across its front page — HUGHES ELECTED WITH 290 VOTES, PERHAPS 312, 7 STATES IN DOUBT; HOUSE REPUBLICAN. In this country there w^as, of course, no over- night excitement, for New York time is five hours behind Greenwich, and the earliest definite news could not reach London till after midnight. For the same reason the ordinary editions of the morning papers on the following day could report RE-ELECTION 237^ no conclusive result, but The Times ran a special late edition bearing on its principal page thie followdng inset : — Mr. Hugl the United STOP PRESS Printing House Square, E.C. Nov. 8, 5.30 a.m. es has been elected President of States. The rest of the late morning papers made the same announcement. The lirst editions of the evening papers pub- lished biographies of the successful Republican candidate, but before the afternoon was far advanced they were issuing posters bearing such legends as " American Election : Remarkable Development " ; or " Is Hughes Elected? Issue in Doubt." By the following morning, November 9th, it was clear that it was anybody's election. So close had been the voting in a number of States that so far from the result being certain, as it regularly was, within three or four hours of the close of the polls, no finality had been reached after more than a night and a day had elapsed. So far as could be ascertained Mr. Wilson was to be credited with 251 electoral votes and Mr. Hughes with 242, Since the total vote was 531 a candidate must secure at least 266 to be elected. , . 238 PRESIDENT WILSON Another day passed and the figures were put at 269 and 247, Mr. Wilson, on this showing', being elected with at least three votes to spare. This cornputation, however, was quite unofficial, and all that could be said with any assurance was that the final result would turn on California and Minnesota, where the voting was so close that a recount might be necessary in either State. California had 13 electoral votes, Minnesota 12. If Mr. Wilson could carry either of the two he was safe. Mr. Hughes would need them both to secure election. In the end they went different roads, California returning a Democratic majority of 3,700 on a poll of over 900,000, and Minnesota a Republican majority of less than 500 on a poll of close on 360,000. It was not till November 23rd, sixteen days after the actual polling, that the Republicans finally abandoned hope, and Mr. Hughes telegraphed to congratulate the President on having won an election unprecedented in the history of the United States. The official totals of electoral votes were : — Wilson 276 Hughes 255 The President therefore had secured ten votes above a bare majority. He was the first Demo- cratic President since Andrew Jackson (1829-37) to be elected for a second consecutive term, for Cleveland, though he was twice President (1885-9 and 1893-7) did not hold office for eight years continuously. On the popular vote Mr. Wilson held a lead of over half a million, RE-ELECTION 239 the totals of each of the five candidates being as follows : — Wilson (Dem.) Hughes (Rep.) Benson (Soc.) ... Hanly (Prohib.) Reimer (Soc.-Lab.) 9,116,296 8,547,474 750,000 ' 225,101 10,105 Mr. Wilson's vote was the highest ever recorded by a Democratic candidate, being 2,800,000 above his own total in 19 12, and Mr. Hughes's the highest ever recorded by a Republican, That is to be accounted for by the growth of the population and the admission of women to the franchise in several States that excluded them in 1 91 2. In all there were over 2 2 n^iiHion more votes cast in 19 16 than at the previous election. The result of the polling was hardly easier to explain than it had been to predict, but a study of the map (opposite p. 227) makes it clear where, if not why, Mr. Wilson won. New England, with the exception of New Hampshire f (which went Democrat by a majority of 56 out of 87,000), was solid for Hughes. The South sent its usual unbroken phalanx of Democratic voters to the electoral college. The Middle West States of Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin all returned Republican majorities. Nothing but a practically solid Democratic vote in the West could have set off that heavy preponderance. The West turned the election. Its returns exceeded the Democrats' highest expectations. Except for ' Figures for certain States estimated. 240 PRESIDENT WILSON Oregon and South Dakota (five votes each), every State from the Pacific Ocean to the Missouri had lined up behind Mr. Wilson. The West had combined with the South to send him back to the White House in the face of the East. And incidentally the President had achieved the unexampled feat of winning against the adverse verdict of New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, which contribute between them no fewer than 112 votes . While no one State was actually more ■-pivotal" than any other, it was a curious irony that thrust on California the appearance of having turned the election. For California -was the scene of a Republican faux p^s that may justly be said to have cost Mr. Hughes the Presi- dency, The State was Republican by tradition. It had four times split its vote, but it had never since the Civil War gone solid for the Democrats. In 191 2 it was Progressive, with a small split. In 1 9 1 6 it should have been secure for the Republicans. But California was not prepared to discard its radicalism. It had cast up a political leader, Hiram Johnson, a strong Pro- gressive, of whom more will be heard at Washington — certainly at the Capitol, it may even be at the White House — in no remote future. He had accepted nomination to the Governorship unwillingly, fought and beaten the party machine, broken the power of the railroad that dominated State politics, and then proceeded to purge California as Woodrow Wilson in his time had purged New Jersey. RE-ELECTION 241 In 19 1 6 Governor Johnson, who was himself standing for the United States Senate, was pre- pared, on the smallest encouragement, to follow the example of his leader Mr. Roosevelt and support the Republican candidate. Unfortunately for the Republican candidate that encouragement was never given. When Mr. Hughes visited California he accepted the ill -conceived advice of a political agent, ignored Mr. Johnson, and took inordinate pains to make it clear that he was standing as a true-blue Republican, with no compromising strain of Progressivism in his political faith. That declaration lost him the thirteen California votes that would have made him President of the United States. Hiram Johnson and his friends were radicals and Republicans. They had a choice between .sup- porting a radical and Democrat on the one hand and a conservative and Republican on the other. They preferred the radical and Democrat. Governor Johnson himself beat his Democratic opponent out of the field for the Senatorship, but the State's Presidential vote went to Wilson. Few conclusive inferences can be drawn from an election so closely contested. It is clear that all the speculations on the effect of the women's vote and the hyphenated vote were superfluous. The women voted one way in one State and the opposite way in another. The hyphenated electors did the same. The Progressives evidently voted Republican in the Eastern States, but in the West they must have given considerable support to Mr. Wilson. There is 16 2:42 PRESIDENT WILSON some evidence of a transference of votes^ as com- pared with 191 2, from the Socialist to the Democratic candidate. The one broad moral to be drawn is that while America would have been quite content to see Mr. Hughes at the White House, she preferred on the whole that Mr. Wilson should remain in possession. His conduct of affairs might be open to criticism at different points, but at any rate he had steered the country through perilous seas without the shipwreck of either its honour or its prosperity. Was it certain that Mr. Hughes could do as much ? The West, at least, was disinclined to take risks on that. The crisis, moreover, was still at its heigkt, and the old 1864 dictum about swapping horses in the middle of a stream was peculiarly applicable to 1916. And to that was added the reflection, probably much more widespread than appeared on the surface, that if war had to come it was well that America should go into it under a leader who hated war and could be relied on to take up arms only under irresistible compulsion. If the secrets of individual votes could be revealed, it is not unlikely that Mr. Wilson would be found to owe his election to Republicans who shrank at the eleventh hour from the responsibility of committing the destinies of America at so critical a moinent to untried hands. It should be added that the elections reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate from 16 to 1 2, and left the balance in the House in the hands of h^li a dozen Progressives, Independents, RE-ELECTION 243 and Prohibitionists. Votes were cast in several States on the prohibition question, with the result that Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota ''went dry." Their accession raised the number of dry States to 25 out of 48. ' CHAPTER XIII THE FUTURE The destiny of America lies written in the hnes oi poets, in the characters of self-sacrificing soldiers, in the conceptions of ambitions of her greater statesmen, lies written in the teachings of her school- rooms, in all those ideals of service of humanity and of liberty for the individual, which are to be found written in the very school-books of the boys and girls whom we send to be taught to be Americans. The destiny of America is an ideal destiny. America has no reason for being, unless her destiny and duty be ideal. It is her incumbent privilege to declare and stand for the rights of men. Nothing else is worth fighting for. Nothing else is worth sacrificing for. — Ai Chicago, January 31, 1916. To make a chapter under this heading anything but brief and tentative would be to court disaster. The prophet's is at all times a thankless role, and a,t a moment like the present, when external events over which America can have no control may sud- denly involve her in war, or betray her President into some fundamental error of judgment that would shatter in a week the high reputation he has built up through four laborious years, any, attempt at confident prediction would be a double folly. Nevertheless there are discernible in American political life certain drifts and tenden- cies of which it is well to take account, even though there can be no certainty that expecta- tions legitimately founded on them will ever be realized. , , 244 THE FUTURE I245 First, as to Mr. Wilson himself. It is not to be supposed that the deep-rooted sentiment against a third Presidential term will be relaxed in his favour when his second quadrennium has been served. March 1921, therefore, will find him at the age of sixty -four, ,and, if present indications are any guide, with many years of vigour and activity still before him, an ex-Presi- dent of the United States. Americans admit frankly that their ex -Presidents are an embar- rassment. A man who has exercised more auto- cratic powers than a constitutional monarch ever wields over a population now approaching a hundred millions cannot quietly disappear when he leaves the White House. It is not consistent with his dignity to fight a contested election for the Senate. As a member of the Cabinet he would tend to limit the President's freedom of action. He may be prepared and qualified to assume the rdle of Elder Statesman, like Jeffer- son in his retirement at Monticello ; but there is always an equal prospect that he will become, like Mr. Roosevelt, a permanent thorn in the side of successors of whichever party. Mr. Wilson is not likely to emulate the Pro- gressive leader's achievements as critic and pamphleteer. It is more likely that he will follow Mr. Taft's sensible and honourable example and go back to the academic work to which he worthily devoted his abilities down to 19 10. But there is one alternative on which an English writer may be permitted to dwell with an emphasis dictated by hope. There is no living ■246 PRESIDENT WILSON American who could fill with greater distinction or success the office of Ambassador to Great Britain, and none whose appointment would be read as a greater honour to the country to which he was accredited. Nor would it be beneath the dignity even of an ex-President of the United States to come to London, not as a mere diplo- matic plenipotentiary, but as Ambassador to a people as well as to a chancellery, as the architect of a spiritual entente, charged with interpreting America to England and England to America as they have been interpreted in the past by James Russell Lowell on the one side and James Bryce on the other. The world may be a different place in four years' time, and it may well appear that the highest task to which a statesmari can bend his energies in the third decade of the twentieth century will be the promotion and consolidation of Anglo-American friendship. But before that question need be seriously con- sidered Mr. Wilson has four years of power in prospect. His personal position has been materially strengthened by his re-election. Lie is still technically a minority President, for when all five candidates' votes in 191 6 are taken into account Mr. Wilson polled a few hundred thousand less than the combined totals of his opponents. But for practical purposes all that need be considered are the Democratic, Repub- lican, and Progressive candidates in 191 2 and the Democratic and Republican in 19 16. And in relation to the Republican-Progressives Presi- cient Wilson^ after four years of unprecedented THE FUTURE -2747 industry and unexampled anxiety, during which his domestic and internal policies challenged criticism at every point and from every quarter, converted a minority of 1,300,000 votes into a majority of 560,000, That vindication of his adminis- tration, coupled with the fact that he is no longer living under the shadow of an impending election, has sensibly increased the President's freedom of action. On the other hand, his hold on Con- gress is less secure, for while in the Sixty-fifth Congress the Senate still has a Democratic majority of 12 (as against 16 in the Sixty -fourth) the parties in the House are so evenly divided that a handful of Independents is likely to hold the balance. Even if America continues to avoid entangle- ment in the war it is probable that there will be some slackening of the legislative pace. Almost all the more important measures fore- shadowed in the Democratic programme of 19 12 have been converted into laws, and concentra- tion on administration is now more needed than a high legislative output. A number of new administrative instruments — a Federal Reserve Board, a Federal Trade Board, a Federal Farm Loan Board, a Tariff Commission, a Shipping Commission — have been set to work, and exist- ing agencies, like the Inter-State Commerce Com- mission, are having new powers conferred upon them. Acts have already been passed providing for naval construction and Army development for some years ahead. What is needed now is that the working of these agencies and schemes shoyld 248 PRESIDENT WILSON be closely observed and where requisite directed and readjusted. That process may entail legis- lation, but no such concentration on lawmaking as marked the four years 191 3-17 appears to be in prospect. In the sphere of party politics the position is interesting and uncertain. Mr. Gladstone, in a mornent of aberration, once declared that Jeffer- son Davis had succeeded in making a nation. With far greater truth it may be affirmed that President Wilson has succeeded in making — or, at the least, remaking — a party. The Democrats, through the personal force of a leader who owed nothing to the favour of bosses or command of party machinery, have in the last four years become once more a living force in Federal politics in America. But while it is certain that Mr. Wilson has remade his party, it is by no means clear what he has remade it into. If Democrats have stood for anything in the past, they have stood for the rights of the States against the Federal Government. Yet there has never been an administration at Washington that can compare with President Wilson's in its record of legisla- tion calculated to strengthen the Federal Govern- ment at the expense of the States . The legislation has been uniformly beneficial, and the Democrats have given its initiator their loyal support throughout. But it remains a fact that the party whose main plank in the past has been local autonomy has for four effective years been devoting its energies to translating into action the principle of centralization. THE FUTURE ^2749 What effect will such a tendency have on the alignment of parties? That depends in part on the future of the Progressives. At present it is still uncertain whether they will preserve their separate identity or merge themselves once more with the Republicans from whom they sprang. And they need not necessarily do either. An effort is being made to maintain the individuality of the party. Whether it succeeds or fails, the Progressives will have to decide whether they have more in common with the conservatism of the Republicans or with the radicalism of the Democrats . In the East they will almost certainly adhere to the Republicans, but in the West that is by no means so inevitable. In 191 6 Mr. Wilson's majority clearly included a consider- able Progressive vote in States like California, and more astonishing developments are possible than the successful candidature at the Presidential election of 1920 of a politician of the type of Governor Hiram Johnson, running as a Progres- sive-Democrat on a programme of social reform. That, however, is purely hypothetic specula- tion. Many things may happen, in America and out of it, before 1920. What is certain is that the West, where the Progressives are strongest, is going from this time on to play a new part in American political life. It elected Mr. Wilson in 191 6, and it will elect more Presidents after him. From the days of Washington onwards the centre of political gravity in America has been steadily moving westwards. The same impulse that drove the P.resident's grandfather, James 25b PRESIDENT WILSON Wilson, from Philadelphia across Pennsylvania into Ohio a century ago has in the intervening decades been driving millions of his fellow- countrymen across the Alleghanies, across the Mississippi, across the Rockies, across the Sierras, to the undiscovered and undeveloped lands of the Far West. That great migration has reached its geographical limit on the shores of the Pacific, but its political limit is still unattained. The broad States beyond the Missouri are as yet thinly peopled, but for generations to come every suc- cessive census will add to their representation in the House, and therefore to their Presidential vote. No man in America has been more sensible than the President of the new meaning of the West. It was not till the tide of migration had swept forward over what is now termed the Middle West, he had told a New Jersey audience as long ago as 1895, that the type of the true American had been evolved. "The West," he declared, " is the great word of our history. The Westerner has been the type and master of our American life." The twenty odd years that have passed since those words were spoken have given them a new force. The West has become a factor that cannot be ignored. It is no mere extension and development of the East. It is essentially different in character. There is a strain of natural and vigorous democracy running through the Western States peculiar to men whose life is spent in a free air and amid wide spaces, who till their own land and call no man master. THE FUTURE '251 - All through American history," says a pro- fessor of a Western University,' '-democracy has been like a trade wind, blowing ever from the sunset." And speaking of an area no farther from New England than the basin of America's great river-highway he writes : -- By its geographical position the Mississippi Valley escapes the temptation to look constantly across the water and model itself upon Old -World, especially English, patterns. Screened in a measure from the sapping' seductiveness of foreign example, it seems destined to be the most American part of our country. Moreover, growth in wealth, prestige, and political power will lend it courage to break away from Eastern example and be itself." 2 What the West will be when its broad plains are populated, and the city population increasingly outnumbers the rural, the future will disclose. To-day it is the home of a robust, if restrained, radicalism, a fertile seed-bed for Mr. Bryan's idealist pacifism, and the main factor in the renewal of Mr. Wilson's commission. Its de- velopment will affect more than America's domestic politics. Now and henceforward the New England peoples whose eyes turn across the Atlantic to Europe must reckon with another people, of the same citizenship but with a different orientation, three thousand miles across the con- tinent, whose ships furrow the Pacific and whose ties will be with the awakening nations of Asia, ' Prof. E. A. Ross of Wisconsin, in Chatiging America. » Ibid, 55':? PRESIDENT WILSON There is peril as well as hope in that prospect. But its full realization would give America a function such as no nation has ever exercised as interpreter and mediator between the Eastern and the Western worlds. President Wilson's consciousness of the poten- tialities of the West bears a relation, direct if not at once apparent, to his belief in the possibility of an international guarantee of peace. The pro- motion of an org^anization directed towards that end — whether under the name of a League to Enforce Peace or any other— is the highest and the greatest work he has set before him. The whole of his foreign policy has been influenced by that dominant purpose. He has laboured at America's practical contribution to such a League, by promoting the adoption of the numerous " cooling-off " treaties,! and he has gone far to banish the danger of war from the American continent by his assurances and proposals to the Latin -American Republics. He repelled the idea of entanglement in the European War, and com- mitted himself to a formidable programme of preparedness, in order that America might be able to contribute to a future League of Nations the mediating influence attaching to a neutral among belligerents, and the material force on which the efficacy of such an organized con- stabulary must for a time depend. The President may have been quixotic. He may have been misguided. He may have been guilty of sacri- ficing his country's prestige beyond justification. ,'^See p. 152. THE FUTURE [2 $3 But at least he was moving towards a definite objective, and an objective so pregnant with beneficent possibilities for humanity that if ever his hopes were realized his part in the work of establishing peace would give him an imperish- able name among the handful of men whose efforts have lifted the world to new moral levels. This is not the time to idealize President Wilson. He is in the midst of his work, and he cannot be judged by it till he has succeeded or failed in carrying it through. He has had the interim reward of being sent back by his countrymen to finish what he has begun, and he has no title to ask more of them or of mankind yet than that his endeavours should be given free scope, and that both appreciative and adverse critics should for a while suspend their verdicts. That does not mean that there is no place for sober judgments on so much of a political career as is already part of history. It has been the aim of the present writer to provide a basis for; such judgments. If this volume has been worth writing at all, it is because a plain record of a man's concrete actions through sixteen years of public, and six of definitely political, life affords a surer revelation of his principles and aims than the most acute and detailed psychological analysis . President Wilson has not yet discarded, it may be that he never will discard, a certain academic chill that limits his personal appeal to the. multitude, as compared, for example, with Mr. :254 l^RESIDENt WILSON Roosevelt's. It is something of the same con- trast seen in English politics between such men as Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George— though that comparison must not be carried beyond the point it is cited to illustrate. But whatever else Woodrow Wilson will stand for in history, posterity will look back to him as the exponent of a great political creed. No statesman living to-day has more consistently^ more resolutely, or with deeper conviction applied in the government of a great commonwealth the lessons of a dis- cerning, a sober, and a constructive liberalism. If his possible influence on the future is to be rightly gauged, it must be estimated in the light of his unconcealed aspiration to promote the application to the government of the world of the principles he has for four years applied to the government of America. " I hope and believe," he said in his address to the Senate on the conditirons of a world peace, '* that I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of every programme of liberty. I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have yet had no place or oppor- tunity to speak their real hearts out." Such words, in the President's mouth, call for a wider interpretation than the special circumstances attending their utterance suggest. They betoken an unashamed idealism— and idealists in high places have in the course of history done as much to retard as to promote the progress of mankind. Mr. Wilson has four clea.r years in which to THE FUTURE 25$ justify his aims. By the time he takes his final leave of the White House we shall be better able than we are to-day to foreshadow the per- manent verdict of history on his exercise of power. APPENDIX AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS The fullest expression of President Wilson's conception of the future role of the United States in international politics is to be found in his address to the Senate on January 21, 191 7, and his second Inaugural on March 5, 191 7. Speak- ing, in the one case to the assembly particularly associated with him by the Constitution and by usage in the direction of foreign policy, and in the other to the nation as a whole, the President enunciated principles whose acceptance would in- volve, in some respects the profound modification, in others the complete supersession, of the Monroe Doctrine. The new policy thus unfolded had been fore- shadovv'ed in Mr. Wilson's declarations on the proposed League to Enforce Peace and in his address to the Pan-American Scientific Conference in January 191 6, but it had never before been worked out in all its fullness ,- in the light of the lessons of the European War. A leader who called on America to abandon frankly and irre- vocably the detachment and isolation that for ninety years had been the comer -stone of her foreign policy was making heavy demands on 17 a57 258 APPENDIX the loyalty of his followers. But there can be little question that the demand will be met, and that those who to-day are charging the President with embarking on perilous adventures will to- morrow be the first to acknowledge his prescience. The two addresses in f-ull are here subjoined. THE SPEECH TO THE SENATE. '• Gentlemen of the Senate,— On the 1 8th of December last I addressed an identic Note to the Governments of the nations now at war requesting them to state, more definitely than they had yet been by either group of belligerents, the terms upon which they would deem it possible to make peace. " I spoke on behalf of humanity and of the rights of all neutral nations like our own, many of whose most vital interests the war puts in constant jeopardy. " The Central Powers united in a reply which stated merely that they were ready to meet their antagonists in conference to discuss terms of peace. " The Entente Powers have replied m.uch more definitely, and have stated, in general terms indeed, but with sufficient definiteness to imply details, the arrangements, guarantees, and acts of reparation which they deem to be the indis- pensable conditions of a satisfactory settlement. *' We are much nearer a definite discussion of the peace which shall end the present war. We are that much nearer the discussion of the inter- national concert which must thereafter hold the world at peace. In every discussion of the peace AMERICA AND WORLD -POLITICS 259 that must end this war it is taken for granted that peace must be followed by a definite concert of the Powers which will make it virtually im- possible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of manldnd, every sane and thoughtful man, must take that for granted. " I have sought this opportunity to address you because I thought that I owed it to you, as the council associated with me in the final deter- mination of our international obligations, to dis- close to you without reserve the thought and purp>ose that have been taking form in my mind with regard to the duty of our Government in the days to come, when it will be necessary to lay afresh and upon a new plan the foundations of peace among the nations. " It is inconceivable that the people of the United States should play no j>art in that great enterprise. To take part in such a service will be the opportunity for which they have sought to prepare themselves by the very principles and purposes of their polity and the approved prac- tices of their Government ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honourable hope that it might in ail that it was and did show mankind the way to liberty. They cannot in honour withhold the service to which' they are now about to be challenged. They do not wish to withhold it. But they owe it to themselves and to the other nations of the world to state the conditions under which they will feel free to render it. " That service is nothing less than this : To 1 add their authority and their power to the I authority and force of other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout the world. Such a settlement cannot now be lonig postponed. It 2 6o APPENDIX is riglit that before it comes this Government should frankly formuliite the conditions upon which it would feel justified in asking our people to approve its formal and solemn adherence to a league for peace, I am here to attempt to state those conditions. " The present war must first be ended, but we owe it to candour and to a just regard for the opinion of mankind to say that, so far as our participation in guar^mtces of future peace is concerned, it makes a great deal of difference in what way and upon what terms it is ended. " The treaties and agreements which bring it to an end must embody terms that will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving, a peace that will win the approval of mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the several interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged. " We shall have no voice in determining what those terms shall be, but we shall, I feel sure, have a voice in determining whether they shall be made lasting or not by the guarantees of a universal covenant; and our judgment upon what is fundamental and essential as a condition prece- dent to permanency should be spoken now, not aiterwards, when it may be too late. " No covenant of co-operative peace that does not include the peoples of the New World ran suffice to keep the future safe against war; and yet there is only one sort of peace that the peoples of America could join in guaranteeing. The elements of that peace must be elements that engage the confidence and satisfy the prin- ciples of the American Government, elements con- sistent with the political faith and the practical convictions which the peoples of America have once for alj embraced and undertaken to defend. AMERICA AND WORLD -POLITICS 261 "I do not mean to say that any American Government would throw any obstacle in the way of any terms of peace the Governments now at war might agree upon, or seek to upset them when made, whatever they might be. I only take it for granted that mere terms of peace between the belligerents will not satisfy even the belligerents themselves. Mere agreements may not make peace secure. " It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of ! the settlement so much greater than the force 1 of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be made' is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind. " The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will determine whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee can be secured. The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this : Is the present a struggle for a just and secure peace or only for a neW~balance of power? TF^Tt be^ only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement ? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a com-_ ji iunity of powe r ; not organized rivalries, l)ut an qrganized_common peace. "TTortunately, we have received very explicit assurances on this point. " The statesmen of both of the groups of nations now arrayed against one another have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, that it was no part of the purpose they had in 262 APPENDIX mind to crush their antagonists. But the implications of these assurances may not be equally clear to all — may not be the same on both sides of the water. I think it will be serviceable if I attempt to set forth what we understand them to be. " They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without victory. " I beg that I may be permitted to put my own interpretation upon it, and that it may be understood that no other interpretation was in my thought. I am seeking only to face realities, and to face them without soft concealments. " Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humilia- tion, under duress, at intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last — only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance. " The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded, if ii is to last, must be an equality of rights ; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small,, between those that are powerful and those that are weak. Right must be based upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend. " Equality of territory or of resources there, of course, cannot be, nor any sort of equality AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS 263 not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legiti- mate development of the peoples themselves . But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for^' freedom of life, not for equipoises of power. / " And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of right among organized nations. " No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that Governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from potentate to potentate as if they were property. " I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth inviolable security of life, of worship, and of industrial and social development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived hitherto under the power of Governments devoted to a faith and purpose hostile to their own. " I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt an abstract political principle which has always been held very dear by those who have sought to build up liberty in America, but for the same reason that I have spoken of the other conditions of peace which seem to me clearly indispensable — because I wish frankly to uncover realities . " Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the convic- tions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of whole populations will fight subtly and constantly against it, and all the world will sympathize. The world can be at peace only if its life is stable, 264 APPENDIX and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquilUty of spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right. " So far as practicable, moreover, every great people now struggling towaj-ds a full development of its resources and of its powers sjhould be assured a direct outlet to the great highways of the seas. " Where this cannot be done by the cession of territory, it no doubt can be done by the neutralization of direct rights of way under the general guarantee which v^U assure the peace itself. With a right comity of arrangement no nation need be shut away from free access to the open paths of the world's commerce. " And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in fact be free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua noii of peace, equality, and co-operation. " No doubt a somewhat radical reconsidera- tion of many of the rules of international prac- tice hitherto thought to be established may be necessary in order to make the seas indeed free and common in practically all circumstances for the use of mankind; but the motive for such changes is convincing and compelling. There can be no trust or intimacy between the peoples of the world without them. The free, constant, unthreatened intercourse of nations is an essen- tial part of the process of peace and of develop- ment. It need not be difficult either to define or to secure the freedom of the seas if the Governments of the world sincerely desire to come to an agreement concerning it. "It is a problem closely connected with the limitation of naval armaments and the co-opera- tion of the navies of the world in keeping the AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS 265 seas at once free and safe, and the question of limiting naval armaments opens the wider, and perhaps more difficult, question of the limitation of armies and of all programmes of military- preparation. Difficult and delicate as these ques- tions are, they must be faced with the utmost candour and decided in a spirit of real accom- modation, if peace is to come with healing in its wings, and come to stay. Peace cannot be had without concession and sacrifice. "There can be no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great and preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there to be built up and maintained. The statesmen of the world must plan for peace and nations must adjust and accommodate their policy to it as they have planned for war and made ready for pitiless contest and rivalry. " The question of armaments, whether on land or on sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind. " I have spoken upon these great matters without reserve and with the utmost explicitness, because it has seemed to me to be necessary if the world's yearning for peace was anywhere to find free voice and utterance. " Perhaps I am the only person in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back. I am speaking as an individual, and yet I am speaking also, of course, as the responsible head of a great Government, and I feel confident that I have said what the people of the United States would wish me to say. " May I not add that I hope and believe that I am in elTect speaking for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of every 266 APPENDIX programme of liberty ? I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have yet had no place or oppor- tunity to s|>eak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear. " And in holding out the expectation that the people and Government of the United States will join the other civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing the perm^anence of peace uj>on such terms as I have named I speak with the greater boldness and confidence because it is clear to every man who can think that there is in this promise no breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfilment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven for. " I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world : that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful. " I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose all act in common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection. " I am proposing government by the consent of the governed ; tliat freedom of the seas which AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS 267 in international conference after conference repre- sentatives of the people of the United States have urged with the eloquence of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty ; and that modera- tion of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not an instru- ment of aggression or of selfish violence. " These are American principles, American, policies. We could stand for no others. And yet they are the principles and policies of forward- looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail." THE SECOND INAUGURAL. " My Fellow-Citizens,— The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place have been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and consequences. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so fruitful in important reforms in our economic and industrial life, or so full of significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set those in order, to correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, to liberate and quicken the processes of national genius and energy, and to lift politics to a broader view of the people's essential inter- ests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction, but I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself, and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. " This is not the time for retrospect. It is a 268 APPENDIX time rather to speak over thoughts and purposes concerning the present and the immediate future. Ahhough we have centred counsel and action with such unusual concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other matters have more and more forced them- selves upon our attention, matters lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we have had no control, but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and more irresistibly into their own current and influence. It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of the whole world and shaken men everywhere with passion and apprehension which they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the thought of our own people has been swayed this way and that under their influence. " We are a composite and cosmopolitan people, we are of the brood of all the nations that are at war, the currents of our thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons back and forth between us and them. The war has inevitably set its mark from the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our politics, our social action. To be indifferent to it or independent of it was out of the question. Yet all the while we have been conscious that we are not a part of it, and in that consciousness, in spite of many divisions, we have been drawn closer together. " We have been deeply wronged upon the seas> but we have not wished to wrong or injure in return, and have retained throughout the con- sciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself. As some of the injuries AMERICA AND WORLD-POLiTICS 269 done to us have become intolerable we have still beea clear that we wished nothing for cmr- selves that we were not ready to demand for all mankind — fair dealing, justice, and freedom to live and be at ease against organized wrong. It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown more and more aware and more and more certain that the part we wished to play was the part of those who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. " We have been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of right and freedom of action. We stand firm in an armed neutrality, since it seems that in no other way we can demonstrate what it is that we insist upon and cannot forgo. We may even be drawn on by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to an active reassertion of our rights as we see them, and to more imme- diate association in the great struggle itself, but nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured. They are too deeply rooted in the principles of our national life to be altered. "We desire neither conquest nor advantage; we wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of another people. We have always pro- fessed an unselfish purpose, and we covet the opportunity to prove that our professions are sincere. There are many things still to do at home to clarify our own politics, and to add new vitality to the industrial processes of our ov/n life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve ; but v^e realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for a stage, and in co-operation with the wide universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things. 270 APPENDIX They will follow ia the immediate wake of the. war itself, and set civilization up again. " We are provincials no longer. The tragical events of thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not, and yet we are not the less Americans if we but remain true to the principles in which we have been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of liberated mankind. " These, therefore, are the things we shall stand for, whether in war or peace : that all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and in the political stability of free peoples, and are equally responsible for their maintenance ; that the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of all nations in all matters of right or privilege ; that peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of power, that Govern- ments derive all their just powers from the con- sent of the governed, and that no other Powers should be supported by the common thought, purpose, or powers of the family of nations ; that the seas should be equally free and safe for the use of all peoples under rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that so far as is practicable they should be accessible to all upon equal terms ; that national armaments should be limited to the necessities of national order and domestic safety ; that the community of interest and power upon which peace will henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or assist AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS 271 revolution in other States should be sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented, " I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow-countrymen. They are your own — part and parcel of your own thinking, of your own motive in affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this, as upon a platform of purpose and action, we can stand together, and it is impera- tive that we should stand together. " We are being forced into a new unity amidst fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall in God's providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of errant humours of party and private interest, and stand forth in the days to come with new dignity of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that the dedication is in his own heart, that the high purpose of the nation is in his own mind, that he is ruler of his own will and desire. " I stand here and have taken the high solemn oath to which you have been audience because the people of the United States have chosen me for this auguct delegation of power, and by their gracious judgment have named me their leader in affairs. I know now what the task means. I realize to the full the responsibility which it involves. I pray God that I be given wisdom and prudence to do my duty in the true spirit of this great people. I am their servant, and can succeed only as they sustain and guide me by their confidence and their counsel. " The thing I shall count upon and the thing without which neither counsel nor action avail is the unity of America — an America united in feeling, in purpH3se, in its vision of duty and its opportunity of service. We have to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and necessities 272 APPENDIX of the nation to their ovvn private profit or use them for the upbuilding of private pMDwer, " Beware that no faction or disloyal intrigue break the harmony lor embarrass the spirit of our people. Beware that our Government be kept pure and incorrupt in all its parts. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance, your united aid. *' The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled. We shall walk with light all about us if we be but true to ourselves — to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world, in the thought of all those who love liberty, justice, and right exalted." INDEX A. B. C. Powers, 123, 126 Adams, John, 97 Adams, J. Q.,68 Adamson Act, 217, 223 Aguas Calientes, 125 Allied Powers, 178, 183, 191, 232 American Constitution, 74,97, 211 American Federation of Labour, 217, 220, 226 American Fedcrationisf, 226 American People, History of, 29 American Truth Society, 234 Anti-Trust Laws, 70, 73, 95, 108 Arabic, s.s., 165, i68-g, 171, 195 Arbitration, 141 Argentina, 123, 138 Arizona, 129 Arms, Embargo on, 116, 119, 121 Army, U.S., 193, 197-8, 200-2 Asquith, H. H,, 177, 178, 254 Atlanta, 20, 31 Atlantic Monthly, 107, 120 Atlantic Ocean, 251 Augusta, 15 Aurora, 13 Austria, 134, 170 Austro-Hungarians, 155 Axson, Miss E. L., 27 Bagehot, Walter, 20 Baker, Newton D., 201 Banks, 105-8 Belgium, 159, 160, 190 Benson, A. J., 239 Bernstorff, Count, 168-9, 17I) 185 Bethmann-HoUweg, Dr. von, 209 " Big Business," 109 Billow Papers, 114 Bingham, Hiram, 139 Black List, 164 Blockade, 159, 161, 162 Bolivia, 126 Boiling Miss Edith, 27 Borah, Senator, 228 Boy-Ed, Captain, 170, 195 Brailsford, H. N., 208 Brazil, 123, 138, 139 British Empire, 142 Brotherhoods, Railway, 220, 221 Bryan, W. J., 65, 71, 72, 79, 117, 122, 147, 148, 167, 198, 209, 233, 251 Bryce, Viscount, 28, 30, 159, 246 Bryn Mawr, 24, 27 Buchanan, President, 79, 80 Buenos Aires, 107, 139 Cabinet, 98 Cabinet Government, 22 California, 148, 149, 238, 240, 241, 249 Canada, 156, 193 Canning, 134 Carbajal, Francisco, 124, 125 Carnegie, Andrew, 26 Carranza, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127-30 Carrizal, 129 Caucus, 98 Chase, Salmon P., 102 18 ^73 2;.4 INDEX Chicago, Ti, 201, 227, 244 Chihuahua, 127, 129, 130 Child labour, 2i8, 219 Chile, 123 Chillicothe, 13 China, 144 Civil War, 15, 102 Clark, Champ, 65, 71 Clay, Henry, 68 Clayton Act, iii, 216, 226 Cleveland, President, 79, 135, 238 Cliosophic, the, 22 Clubs, Students', 37 Coastwise shipping, 144 Colombia, 85, 146, 147, 151 Colorado, 215 Columbia (South Carolina), 17, 18 Columbus (New Mexico), 127 Combinations, 60, 91, 108 Commission government, 59 Commons, House of, 20 Congressional Government, 24, 28 Conscription, 202 Constitutional Government, 29, 65 Continental Army, 200, 201 Conventions, Party, 70, 75, 227, 229 " Cooling-off " treaties, 151, 152 Corporation rule, 93 Corporations, Regulation of, 57 Corruption, 48, 49 Costa Rica, 140 Credit, 205 Cuba, 85, 136, 149 . Cummins, Senator, 228 Currency Bill, 73, 102-7 Danish West Indies, 148 Davidson College, 17 Davis, Jefferson, 16, 248 Debs, Eugene, 76 Declaration of London, 161 Democracy, 47 Dernburg, Herr, 169 Derry, J. T., 17 Detroit, 157 Diaz, Felix, 119 Diaz, Porfirio, 86, 114, 131 Division and Reunion, 29 Dumba, Dr., 170, 195 Edison, T, A., 196, 201, 233 Edwards, Jonathan, 19 Eight-hours day, 221, 222-5 Election of 1912, 65-77 Election of 1916, 48, 227-43 Electoral College, 74 Eliot, Dr. C. W., 107, 120 El Paso, 129 Emery, Piof. H. C, 92 Employers' Liability, 57, 214 Entente Powers, 127, 155 Europe, 135, 251 European War, 6, 107, 113, 137, 138, 153-87, 189, 190. 192, 194) 215. 231 Fairbanks, Ex-Senator, 228 Federal Child Labour Act, 218, 219 Federal Farm Loan Act, 218 Federal Land Banks, 218 Federal Reserve Bank, 105, 106 Federal Reserve Board, 106, 107 186, 205,218, 247 Federal Trade Commission, no- 12, 247 Federalists, 67 Ford, Henry, 157, 198, 233 Foreign policy, 133-52 France, 156, 161 Franklin, Benjamin, 14 Fraternities, 37 Free Trade, 22, 31 Fremont, General, 68 Funston, General, 129 Gait, Mrs. Norman, 27 Garfield, President, 16 INDEX 275 Garrison, Lindley M., 200, 201 Gentleman's Magazine, 20 George, D. Lloyd, 103, 154 George Washington, 29 Geran Bill, 56, 57 Gerard.T. W., .185 Germany, 138, 139, 140, 155, 161- 9, 170-6, 178, 180-2, 185-6 Gladstone, W. E., 248 Glass, Carter, 105 Gompers, Samuel, 217, 226 Graduate School, 39 Great Britain, 135, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165, 191, 207 Grey, Viscount (Sir Edward), 144, 163, 164, 209 Guatemala, 126, 140 Hague Conventions, 159 Hale, W. B., 73 Hamilton, Alexander, 67 Harvey, Col., 65 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 144 Hayti, 138 Hesperian, S.S., 165, 169, 171 Holy Alliance, 134 House of Commons, 20 Huerta, Victoriano, 117, 120-4, 153 Hughes, Charles Evans, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235-42 Hyphenated, 171, 232 Illinois, 235, 236, 239, 240 Immigration, 148, 149 Inaugural Address, 78, 267 Income-tax, 70, 100 Indianapolis, 126 Industrial workers of the world, 215 Initiative, 84 Interlocking directorates, 94, iii International Review, 23, 31, 98 Inter-Slate Commerce Commis- sion, III, 221, 222, 224, 247 Jackson, Andrew, 68, 80, 97, 238 Japan, 136, 138, 148, 149, 150 Jefferson, Thomas, 67, 97, 135, 245 Johns Hopkins, 24 Johnson, Andrew, 17, 135 Johnson, Hiram, 240, 241, 249 Joint Commission (Mexico), 129, 130 Kansas, 199 Knight, E. C, 109, 214 Labour, 213-26 Labour boycott, 109, 112 Labour, Department of, 80 La Follette, Senator, 83, 217 Land Banks, 218 Lane, Franklin K,, 131 Lansing, Robert, 142, 163, 167, 171, 172, 181 Latin America, 131, 134, 140, 143, 152, 193, 252 Lawrence, 215 League of Nations, A, 208 League to Enforce Peace, 166, 183, 189, 207, 208-11, 252 Lincoln, Abraham, 15, 16, 68, 97, 155, 202 Lind, Ex-Governor, 121 Lloyd George, see George. Lobbying, 100, loi Lodge, Henry Cabot, 107, 122, 146 Long Branch, 234 Lowell, James Russell, 246 Lucy, Sir Henry, 20 Lusitania, s.s., 126, 165-7, 169, 191, 195 Lynde Debate, 22 Lyons, Lord, 163 McAdoo, W. G., 79 McCombs, William F., 67 Machine, Party, 41, 53, 89 276 INDEX Madero, Francisco, 86, 115 Madison, President, 19 Maine, 234 Manhattan Club, 188 Marina, s.s., 165, 176 Martine, James E., 51-3 Mediation (European War), 159 Mediation Conference (Mexico), 124 Merchant shipping, 203 Merc Literature, 29 Mexico, 113-32, 135. 136, 138, 140, 141, 151, 191, 192 Mexico City, 124, 125 Middle West, 159, 170, 198, 232, 235. 239, 250 Militia, 191, 200, 201, 202 Milwaukee, 74, 199, 232 Minnesota, 238 Mississippi, River, 232, 251 Missouri, River, 240, 250 Missouri, Oklahoma, Gulf Rail- road, 224 Money Trust, 94, 102 Monopoly, 49, 87, 91 Monroe, Fort, 16 Monroe, President, 134 Monroe Doctrine, 114, 115, 133-8, 155, 157, 184,211 Morgan directorships, 94 National Guard, 195, 201 Nationalization (railroad), 224-5 Naval Appropriation Bill, 194 Navy, U.S., 193, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203 Nebraskaii, s.s. 168 New England, 157, 165, 192, 231, 251 New Freeflow, the, 28, 73, 83, 95, 110, 213 New Hampshire, 239 New Jersey, 30, 42, 43-64, 213, ..V234, 240 New London, 129 New Mexico, 129 New Republic, the, 156 New York, 75, 199, 201, 234, 235 236 New York Evening Post, 233 Netv York Herald, 236 New York Times, 236 New York Tribune, 236 New York World, 131 Newlands Commission, 224 Niagara Falls, 124 Nicaragua, 140, 147 Notes, 164, 166, 175, 179, 180-2 Obregon, Gen,, 129 Old Master, An, 29 O'Leary, Jeremiah, 234 Orders in Council, 161 Oregon, 240 Outlook, the, 161 Pacific Ocean, 136, 240, 250 Pacifism, 232, 251 Palmer, Congressman, 227 Panama, 70, 85, 144, 146, 151 Pan-Americanism, 118, 140-3, 147, 187, 193, 230 Papen, Captain von, 170, 195 Parral, 129 Parties, Political, 46, 47 Paterson, 215 Patton, Dr. F. L., 29 Pennsylvania, 235, 236, 240 Pennsylvania Railroad, 93 Pershing, Gen., 128, 130 Philippines, 70, 137, 148, 149, 150, 151, 197 Pittsburg, 14, 199 Porto Rico, 85, 137, 149, 197 Preceptorial system, 36 Preparedness, 188-212 Primary, 49, 84 Princeton, 19-22, 23-42, 213 INDEX 277 Proctor, W. C, 39 Progressives, 55, 72, 73, 217, 229, 230, 235, 240, 241, 242, 246, 249 Prohibition, 243 Public Utilities Commission, 58 Railway unrest, 220-4 Recall, 84 Reconstruction, 17 Referendum, 84 Renick (and Wilson), 20, 23 Rio Grande, 116, 143 Roosevelt, T., 72, 74, 76, ^T, 78, 81. 84, no, 115, 117, 130, 135, 138, 146, 169, 198, 228-9, 241, 245, 254 Root, Elihu, 107, 122, 207, 228 Ross, Prof. E. A., 251 Rural credits, 70, 108, 218 Rush, Richard, 134 Russia, 134 Russo-Japanese War, 136 St. Louis, 199, 230 St. Stephen's, 20 San Domingo, 85, 116, 135, 138 Savannah, 16, 27 Scott, Gen. H. L., 129 Scott, Winfield, 114 Seamen's Act, 217 Seamen's Union, 218 Senate (New Jersey), 50 " Seven Sisters," 60 Sherman Act, io8-io, 216 Sherman, W. T., 15, 16 Shipping Act, 203, 204, 230 Shipping Board, 205, 247 Smith, James, 49-52 Social reform, 213-26 Socialists, 235 South, the, 15, 235 South America, 131, 134, 138, I39' 187, 193 South Dakota, 240 Southern Pacific Railroad, 93 Spain, 134, 150, 155 Spanish-American War, 130, 136, 149, 169 Spoils System, 47 Standard Oil Company, 109, 215 State, The, 28 State, the American, 43, 44 States rights, 68, 87, 248 Staunton, 15 Steubenville, 14 Stone, Senator, 173 Strikes, 215, 219-22 Submarines, 159, 162, 172, 177, 185 Sumter, Fort, 17 Supreme Court, 109, 148,215, 216, 219, 224, 228 SussiW, s.s., 165, 174, 186 Swann Bequest, 39 Taft, William H., 69, 72, 76, 77, 78, 81, 116, 144, 150, 207, 228, 245 Tampico, 121 Tariff Act (1913), 98-101, 104, 216 Tariff Commission, loi, 247 Tariffs, 22,70, 91, 96 Taussig, Prof., 102 Taylor, Zachary, 114 Texas, 114, 129 Times, The, 157, 237 Titanic, s.s., 217 Trade Disputes Act, II2, 216 Underwood, Oscar, 99, loi, 146 United States ^Steel Corporation, 92 » 95 Universities, American, 30 Uruguaj', 126 Venezuela, 135 Vera~Cru'z7l20, 122, 123, 125, 127, 153 Villa, Gen., 119, I2i, 124, 125, 127, 13Q 278 INDEX Virginia, 15 Virginia Bar Association, 54 Virginia, University of, 20 Wall Street, 235 War, Civil, see Civil War, War, European, see European War. Washington, George, 16, 26, 29, 67, 97, 155 Wesleyan University, 24 West, Dr. Andrew, 39 West, the, 157, 198, 232, 235, 239, 241, 242, 249-52 Whig Hall, 22 Whigs, 68 Wilmington, 19 Wilson, James, 13, 249 Wilson, Joseph Ruggles, 14 Wilson, W. B., 80 Wilson, Woodrow, ancestry, 13 ; birth, 15 ; childhood, 15, 16 ; education, 17-19 ; enters at Princeton, 19 ; practises law at Atlanta, 20 ; at Johns Hop- kins, 24 ; at Bryn Mawr, 24 ; at Wesleyan University, 24 ; professor at Princeton, 24 ; President of Princeton, 25 ; marriage, 27 ; publications, 28-9 ; Governor of New Jersey, 50 ; nominated for President, 71 ; elected Presi- dent, 76 ; and Mexico, 113-32 ; his foreign policy, 133-52 ; and the European War, 153- 87 ; and preparedness, 188- 206 ; and League to Enforce Peace, 207-11 ; and Labour, 213-26; re-nominated for Presi- dent, 230 ; re-elected, 238 ; his future, 245-6 Wisconsin, 251 Women's Franchise, 230 Woodrow, Miss Janet, 14 Woodrow, Rev. Thos., 13 Wyman, Isaac, 42 Zapata, General, 115, 119, 121, 125 Printed in Gnat Britain by UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED WOKING AND LONDON If d^m u^