President Wilson's Addresses Part 1

President Wilson's Addresses.

by Woodrow Wilson.

INTRODUCTION

These addresses of President Woodrow Wilson represent only the most recent phase of his intellectual activity. They are almost entirely concerned with political affairs, and more specifically with defining Americanism. It will not be forgotten, however, that the life of Mr.

Wilson as President of the United States is but a short period compared with the whole of his public career as professor of jurisprudence, history, and politics, as President of Princeton University, as Governor of New Jersey, as an orator, and as a writer of many books.

Surprise has been expressed that a man, after reaching the age of fifty, should be able to step from the "quiet" life of a teacher and author into the resounding regions of politics; but Mr. Wilson's life as a scholar, professor, and author was not at all quiet in the sense of being easy or untouched with exciting chances and changes, and, in the second place, he carried into politics the steadying ideals and the methodical habits of his former occupation.

As these addresses themselves prove, he has retained something of the teacher's interest in showing the relation between specific instances and the general forms of thought or action of which they are a part. Not fact alone, but principle, is what he seeks to discover to his audiences. In the addresses made in 1913 it is apparent that his main effort was to fasten attention upon the principles of international justice and good will and to restrain the impulses of those Americans who were inclined to hasty action with reference to Mexico. From the beginning of the Great War to a point not much earlier than our own entrance into the struggle, he counselled neutrality and inaction, with what motives one must judge from his statements and from events. Only a few speeches belonging to this period have been included in the present collection. When it became practically certain that war between the United States and Germany was inevitable, there came into his utterances a new temper and a more direct kind of eloquence. With scarcely an exception, this collection includes every one of his addresses made between August, 1916, and February, 1918.

Some of the addresses are state papers, read to Congress, and were carefully composed. Others, delivered in various places, appear to have been more or less extemporaneous. All are full of their author's political philosophy, and many of them contain expressions of his opinions on general subjects, such as personal character and conduct.

In order more fully to appreciate the weight of experience and the maturity of reflection which give value to his words, it will be worth while to consider Mr. Wilson's entire career as a scholar and man of letters, paying particular attention to the growth of his political ideals and to the qualities of his style.

To be a literary artist, a writer must possess a constructive imagination. He must be a man of feeling and have the gift of imparting to others some share of his own emotions. On almost every page of President Wilson's writings, as in almost all his policies, whether educational or political, is stamped the evidence of shaping, visionary power. Those of us who have known him many years remember well that in his daily thought and speech he habitually proceeded by this same poetic method, first growing warm with an idea and then by a.n.a.logy and figure kindling a sympathetic heat in his hearers.

The subjects that may excite an artist's imagination are infinitely numerous and belong to every variety of conceivable life. A Coleridge or a Renan will make literature out of polemical theology; a Huxley will write on the physical basis of life with emotion and in such a way as to infect others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will give what color he please to the story of a nation and compel all but the most wary readers to see as through his eyes. We are too much accustomed to reserve the t.i.tle of literary artist for the creator of fiction, whether in prose or in verse. Mr. Wilson is no less truly an artist because the vision that fires his imagination, the vision he has spent his life in making clear to himself and others and is now striving to realize in action, is a political conception. He has seen it in terms of life, as a thing that grows, that speaks, that has faced dangers, that is full of promise, that has charm, that is fit to stir a man's blood and demand a world's devotion; no wonder he has warmed to it, no wonder he has clothed it in the richest garments of diction and rhythm and figure.

There are small artists and great artists. Granted an equal portion of imagination and an equal command of verbal resources, and still there will be this difference. It is an affair of more or less intellectual depth and more or less character. If character were the only one of these two things to be considered in the case of Mr. Wilson's writings, one might with little or no hesitation predict that the best of them would long remain cla.s.sics. They are full of character, of a high and fine character. They have a tone peculiar to themselves, like a man's voice, which is one of the most unmistakable properties of a man. It would be no reflection on an author to say that his point of view in fundamental matters had changed in the course of thirty or forty years; but the truth is that with reference to his great political ideal Mr.

Wilson's point of view has not widely changed. The scope of his survey has been enlarged, he has filled up the intervening s.p.a.ce with a thousand observations, he sees his object with a more penetrating and commanding eye; but it is the same object that drew to itself his youthful gaze, and has had its part in making him

"The generous spirit, who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought."

The world, in time, will judge of the amount of knowledge and the degree of purely intellectual force that Mr. Wilson has applied in his field of study. A contemporary cannot well p.r.o.nounce such a judgment, especially if the province be not his own.

In the small s.p.a.ce at my disposal I shall try, first, to say what I think is the political conception or idea upon which Mr. Wilson has looked so steadily and with so deep emotion that he has made of it a poetical subject. And then I shall venture to distinguish those processes of imagination, that artistic method, which we call style, by which he has elucidated its meaning for his readers so as to win for it their intelligent and moved regard. The inquiry will take into account his earliest book, _Congressional Government_, published in 1885, _Division and Reunion_, 1893, _An Old Master and Other Political Essays_, 1893, _Mere Literature and Other Essays_, 1896, _George Was.h.i.+ngton_, 1897, _The State_, written 1889, rewritten 1898, _A History of the American People_, 1902, _Const.i.tutional Government in the United States_, 1908, and a volume, issued very recently in England, containing some of the President's statements on the war and ent.i.tled _America and Freedom_.

Like a strong current through these works runs the doctrine that in a good government the law-making power should be also the administering power and should bear full and specific responsibility; safeguards against ill-considered action being provided in two directions, by the people on the one hand, and on the other hand by law and custom, these latter being considered historically, as an organic growth. He finds the elements and essentials of this doctrine in our Const.i.tution, though somewhat obscured by the old "literary" theory of checks and balances.

He finds it more fully acknowledged in the British Const.i.tution. He finds it originating in our English race, enunciated at Runnymede, developing by a slow but natural growth in English history, sanctioned in the Pet.i.tion of Right, the Revolution of 1688, and the Declaration of Rights, achieved for us in our own Revolution, and ill.u.s.trated by the implied powers of Congress and the more directly exercised powers of the House of Commons. It is a corollary of this doctrine that the President of the United States, to whom in the veto and in his peculiar relations to the Senate our Const.i.tution gives a very real legislative function, should a.s.sociate himself closely with Congress, not merely as one who may annul but also as one who initiates policies and helps to translate them into laws. In his _Congressional Government_, begun when he was a student in Princeton and finished before he was twenty-eight years old, Mr. Wilson clearly indicates his dissatisfaction with the tradition which would set the executive apart from the legislative power as a check against it and not a cooperating element; and it is a remarkable proof of the man's integrity and persistent personality that one of his first acts as President was to go before the Congress as if he were its agent.

If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century and have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the Continent of Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this country, as a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all that concerns jurisprudence, we Americans belong.

The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined legislative-administrative power is, he declares, national respect for the spirit of those general legal conceptions which, through many centuries, have been making themselves part and parcel of our racial instinct. He perceives that the British Const.i.tution, though unwritten, is as effective as ours and commands obedience fully as much as ours, and that both appeal to a certain ingrained legal sense, common to all the English-speaking peoples. These peoples do not really have revolutions. What we call the American Revolution was only the reaffirming of principles which were as precious in the eyes of most Englishmen as they were in the eyes of Was.h.i.+ngton, Hamilton, and Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar circ.u.mstances, neglected or contravened. Political development in this family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by evolution. On all these points his _Const.i.tutional Government in the United States_ is only a richer and more mature statement and ill.u.s.tration of the ideas expressed in his _Congressional Government_.

The main thesis of his _George Was.h.i.+ngton_ is that the great Virginian and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action. Again and again he pays respect to Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of book and teacher is significant. _Mere Literature_ shows how Mr. Wilson revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their lessons well. In _An Old Master and Other Essays_, he had already borne witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as compared with Continental writers, ill.u.s.trate in the field of economics the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic processes.

Mr. Wilson's _Division and Reunion_ is an admirable treatment of a question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known text-book _The State_, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in detail of the functions and objects of government, with special reference to law and its workings. His _History of the American People_, though it contains many pa.s.sages of insight and has the charm that comes from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repet.i.tious. A great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is insufficient as a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it really is.

Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their faults, the administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of enormous difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and intemperance. The disadvantage of having been written originally under pressure in monthly instalments, for a periodical, is clearly visible in the _History_.

There is a too constant effort to catch the eye with picturesque description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others, Mr. Wilson evokes in his readers a n.o.ble image of that government, const.i.tutional, traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the days of his youth, aroused in him a poetic enthusiasm.

And now for the way his imagination works and clothes itself in language. The quality of his mind is poetic, and his style is highly figurative. There have been very few professors, lecturing on abstruse subjects, such as economics, jurisprudence, and politics, who have dared to give so free a rein to an instinct frankly artistic. In the early days of his career, Mr. Wilson was invited to follow two courses which were supposed to be inconsistent with each other. The so-called "scientific" method, much admired at that time even when applied to subjects in which philosophic insight or a sense for beauty are the proper guides, was being urged upon the rising generation of scholars.

Perhaps the Johns Hopkins University was the center of this impulse in America; at least it was thought to be, though the source was almost wholly German. If he had had to be a dry-as-dust in order to be a writer on politics and history, Mr. Wilson would have preferred to turn his attention to biography and literary criticism. But he promptly resolved to disregard the warnings of pedants and to be a man of letters _though_ a professor of history and politics. I well remember the irritation, sometimes amused and sometimes angry, with which he used to speak of those who were persuaded that scholars.h.i.+p was in some way contaminated by the touch of imagination or philosophy. He at least would run the risk. And so he set himself to work cultivating the graces of style no less a.s.siduously than the exactness of science. There is a distinct filiation in his diction, by which, from Stevenson to Lamb and from Lamb to Sir Thomas Browne, one can trace it back to the quaint old prose writers of the seventeenth century. I remember his calling my attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic qualities of those worthies. Many of his colors are from their ink-horns, in which the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he is sententious and didactic he seems to have caught something of Emerson's manner. And indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of optimism and a slightly dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and persuasive, tone which he has in common with the New England sage.

But in spite of all these resemblances to older authors, Mr. Wilson gives proof in his style of a masterful independence. He is constantly determined to think for himself, to get to the bottom of his subject, and finally to express the matter in terms of his own personality.

Especially is this evident in his early works, where he struggles manfully to be himself, even in the choice of words and phrases, weighing and a.n.a.lyzing the most current idioms and often making in them some thoughtful alteration the better to express his exact meaning. His literary training appears to have been almost wholly English. There are few traces in his writings of any cla.s.sical reading or of any first-hand acquaintance with French, German, or Italian authors. And indeed in the substance of his thought I wonder if he is sufficiently hospitable to foreign ideas, especially to the vast body of comment on the French Revolution. I imagine few Continental authorities would agree with him in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of that great movement, which he seems to regard with almost unmitigated disapproval.

In Mr. Wilson's addresses and public letters concerning the War he re-affirms his principles and applies them with high confidence to the fateful problems of this time. His tone has become vastly deeper and sounder since he made his great decision, and from his Speech to Congress, on February 3, 1917, to his recent Baltimore appeal, it has rung true to every good impulse in the hearts of our people. His letter to the Pope is in every way his master-piece, in style, in temper, and in power of thought. He has led his country to the place it ought to occupy, by the side of that other English democracy whose inst.i.tutions, ideals, and destiny are almost identical with our own, as he has demonstrated in the writings of half a lifetime. Let us hope there was prophetic virtue in a pa.s.sage of his _Const.i.tutional Government_, where, speaking of the relation between our several States and the Union that binds them together, he says they "may yet afford the world itself the model of federation and liberty it may in G.o.d's providence come to seek."

No one can rise from a perusal of the great ma.s.s of Mr. Wilson's writings without an almost oppressive sense of his unremitting and strenuous industry. From his senior year in college to the present day he has borne the anxieties and responsibilities of authors.h.i.+p. The work has been done with extreme conscientiousness in regard to accuracy and clearness of thinking and with sedulous care for justness and beauty of expression. It might well crown a life with honor. And when we remember the thousands of his college lectures and the hundreds of his miscellaneous addresses which have found no record in print, when we recall the labors of university administration which crowded upon him in middle life, when we consider the spectacle of his calm, prompt, orderly, and energetic performance of public duty in these latter years, our admiration for the literary artist is enhanced by our profound respect for the man.[A]

[A] A considerable part of this Introduction appeared originally as an article in _The Princeton Alumni Weekly_.

PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESSES

FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS

[Delivered at the Capitol, in Was.h.i.+ngton, March 4, 1913.]

There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to a.s.semble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the question I am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the occasion.

It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister.

Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend their real character, have come to a.s.sume the aspect of things long believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.

We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral force. Nowhere else in the world have n.o.ble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance.

But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.

We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.

We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all its sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs; watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine. We have studied, as perhaps no other nation has, the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or economy as we should, either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.

Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty.

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not s.h.i.+elded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own const.i.tuent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure-food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.

These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fas.h.i.+oned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that s.h.i.+nes from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.

And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn pa.s.sion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of G.o.d'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. G.o.d helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!

FIRST ADDRESS TO CONGRESS

[Delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, at the beginning of the first session of the Sixty-third Congress, April 8, 1913.]

MR. SPEAKER, MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS: