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 qualification. 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.

Quite 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 accomplish 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 affairs-though my American friends are disposed to question this-but there is manifestly 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 judgments. 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 1917

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 1914, and he is under an inevitable but unfortunate temptation to form sweeping estimates of a nation and 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.

Without

Such estimates may by an accident be accurate, but if so it can only be by an accident. entering into that, 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,

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 contribution 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 English life was written.

As for myself, my chief title to attempt such a task is a lively consciousness of my own limitations. 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 appreciation, nor what is sometimes a little grandiloquently 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 men of thought and

are engaging him and all

action in America to-day. It has seemed to me

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.

February 1917.

H. W. H.