the term of April, 1877-78, was one of the managing editors from November, 1877, to January, 1878, and was sole managing editor from May, 1878, to May, 1879. The most remarkable and significant performance of his undergraduate period was an article on "Cabinet Government in the United States", contributed to the International Review and printed in August, 1879. That a youth of twenty-three should have been able to produce such an article was considered a remarkable performance. It is marked by a breath of knowledge, range of vision, and independence of thought that is rarely found in youth, however brilliant and gifted. Such an article could never have been created merely upon the basis of a college curriculum. It was the outcome of personal observation and experience, and these are not the qualifications one is apt to acquire during the undergraduate period. The matter becomes intelligible when it is considered what pungent occasion for interest in public affairs was supplied by the impressions of his youth during the Reconstruction Period in the South, and how that interest presided over his thought and reading. Wilsons bent was definitely historical and political. At Princeton he read widely and wisely, studying particularly Chatham and Burke, Brougham and Macaulay. Bagehot was an inexhaustible mine of suggestion and inspiration. He wrote and debated. In the latter field he was a little slow in coming to the front, but by degrees he found himself even in this field, and by his fourth year at Princeton he was recognized as the foremost speaker of Whig Hall, and was, as a matter of course, chosen to represent it at the annual 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 endeavor to make what he concieved to be the cause appear the better, he tore up the slip and retired from the debate. worse The interest of an episode trifling in itself lies in the evidence it affords of the depth of Wilsons political convictions at the time. He could not persvade himself to speak affirmatively on a subject he did not believe in, and it is a tribute to his sincerety and honesty that he refused to do so. After getting his A. B. degree from Princeton in 1879, Woodrow Wilson matriculated in the law school of the Uni versity of Virginia in the autumn of the same year. While there he applied himself diligently to forensic training. He developed his voice by joining the chapel choir and the glee club. He was active in the Jeffersonian Society, and won its gold medal for oratory. The University of Virginia magazine for March, 1880, contains a report of an oration on John Bright, which Wilson delivered before the Jeffersonian Society; and the number for April, of the same year, contains an essay on Gladstone, signed "Atticus" which was Wilsons pen name in writing for college periodicals. Just before Christmas, 1880, Wilson left the University of Virginia and returned home. From overstudy and lack of diversion his health had broken down, and in order to recover a change of scene became necessary. During the ensuing year he remained at his home in Wilmington. resting, reading, exercising, and restoring his health. In May, 1882, he went to Atlanta to begin the practice of law. In that year Atlanta received a visit from a tariff commission created by Congress and Wilson was among the witnesses who appeared before it. He spoke in behalf of free trade, with a qualification which he stated thus: "No man with his senses about him would recommend perfect freedom of trade in the sense that there should be no duties whatever laid on imports. 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 that surplus should be so small that it will not lead to jobbery and corruption of the worst sort." Wilson had not been attracted to Atlanta by any personal associations but simply because the City was growing so rapidly that it seemed to offer a promising field for a young practitioner. As matters turned out it did not give an opening to Wilson. He formed a partnership with a young student friend, Edward Renick, and waited for clients who did not come. The good citizens of Atlanta paid no attention to the new firm of young lawyers probably had enough of them before and the result was that the firm broke up, took down their sign and went away in less than a year from their entrance into Atlanta. This turn in his affairs seemed to please Wilson best. He had come to the conclusion that without being in possession of private fortune it was no use sitting down in Atlanta to wait for clients, and even if clients and practice had come to him they would only hinder him in the pursuit of studies on which he had set his heart. Such considerations had their final issue in a determination to quit the practice of law in order to become a professed student and educator in the field of jurisprudence. Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore was at that time making a strong appeal to the South as an institution for postgraduate work, and he went into residence there in the autumn of 1883. The following year he was appointed to a fellowship in history. He spent two years at Johns Hopkins University, during which he finished a thesis, upon the acceptance of which the degree of doctor of Philosophy was conferred upon him, in 1886. His career at Johns Hopkins was brilliantly successful. He made a strong impression upon his associates, both by his intellectual power and by his personal traits. He acquired the sort of reputation in university circles that marks one as a coming man and puts one forward for academic preferment. The call, indeed, came before he had taken his doctor's decree, and he left Johns Hopkins to join the faculty at Bryn Mawr College in 1885. But such was the appreciation of the university authorities that they arranged to keep him still associated with their work through a visiting lectureship to which he was appointed in 1887. His two years at Johns Hopkins closed the pupillary stage of his career. It was rather protracted, as he was in his thirtieth year before he |