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 PresidentsWashington and Jefferson, 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 recollection 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 of active warfare,

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 Confederates 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 nineteenth 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 today. 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

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, Woodrow 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 vicissitudes of Andrew Johnson's calamitous administration were little calculated to stir the interest of a boy of twelve; but when, with Grant's succession, the work of reconstruction and reconciliation 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

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 hopeless 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 reconstruction. 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

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 seaport, where the Rev. Joseph Wilson now held a charge. The town had considerable historic interest, and migration thither enabled the 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 matriculated 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 outstanding distinction. His "class" (i.e. the entry of his year) produced forty-two honours men in the graduating year 1879, Wilson standing fortyfirst 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 11 inches and weighed 156 pounds. By the time he had graduated A.B. at Princeton, Wilson had concluded that the practice of law (in America the profession has not two branches, as in England)