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-graduate 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 practitioners 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 investment in undertakings, spiritual as well as material, which advance the race and help all men to a better life.

Inaugural Address as President of Princeton, October 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 1910 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 traditions. 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

tide of revolutionary war had flowed round it, leaving the marks of conflict on the college buildings. 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 include 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

1 P. 22.

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 something 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 rather 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 1914, in the second year of her husband's Presidency; and that in December 1915 Mr. Wilson was married to Mrs. Norman Galt, formerly Miss Edith Bolling, 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

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 university theses, only with Mr. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, first written as an Oxford prize exercise. 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 textbook in the field of political science, The State gained for its author recognition at the hands of a competent English 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."

I

With the exception of these two notable works and The New Freedom, a collection of campaign speeches published in 1913, after his election as President, all Mr. Wilson's books were

Oscar Browning, Preface to 1899 edition of The State.