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 1 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."

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

1 Oscar Browning, Preface to 1899 edition of The State,

issued during the periods of his professorship and presidency at Princeton. In 1893 Division and Reunion, 1829-1889, a study of the ultimate springs and effects of the Civil War, appeared, and the same year saw the publication of a collection of essays grouped under the title An Old Master. In 1896 George Washington, a singularly human and attractive appreciation of the liberator of the American colonies, was published, and coincidently with it another essay volume bearing the name Mere Literature. In the year of Dr. Wilson's election to the presidency of the university his lengthiest work, a History of the American People, in five volumes, made its appearance, to be followed six years later by the last of his treatises on the theory of government, Constitutional Government in the United States. It is hardly matter for surprise that the responsibilities attaching to the Governorship of New Jersey and the Presidency of the United States should in the past six years have left scant leisure for literary production.

In June 1902 the President of Princeton, Dr. Francis Landey Patton, resigned, and three months later, at the beginning of the new academical year, Dr. Woodrow Wilson succeeded to his office, the appointment falling by universal consent to the member of the faculty whose writings and occasional addresses, principally on educational subjects, outside Princeton had won him distinction such as none of his colleagues could claim. The presidency had never before been held by a layman.

The opening of Mr. Wilson's public career may more properly be fixed in 1902, when he became President of Princeton, than in 1910, when he was elected Governor of New Jersey. The importance of a university president in America is not to be appreciated from any analogy drawn between Yale or Harvard or Princeton and Oxford or Cambridge, still less between the American foundations and an individual Oxford or Cambridge college. Parallels have been drawn between the President of Princeton and the Master of Trinity or the Dean of Christ Church. The comparison is misleading. The university in America, holds a larger place in the life of the nation than in either England or Scotland, and the prestige attaching to its Presidency is correspondingly enhanced. Lord Bryce in his American Commonwealth dwells on the "almost monarchical position" of the President within the university.

66

His powers," he adds, "in the management of the institution and the selection of professors are much greater than those of the head of an English or Scottish university. But he is often also a leading figure in the State, perhaps even in the nation. No persons in the country, hardly even the greatest railway magnates, are better known, and certainly none are more respected, than the Presidents of the leading universities." It may be observed in addition that geographically Princeton, particularly in view of its strong Southern connection, tended to provide a more effective platform than Harvard in Massachusetts, 1 Vol. ii. chap. cix.

or Yale in Connecticut, or Cornell in New York State.

But it was less in the public position it gave him than in the opportunity it afforded for the display in action of his fearless and constructive radicalism that his acceptance of the Presidency of Princeton marked a new starting-point in Mr. Wilson's career. Not that there is any breach or revolution in the development of his purposes and principles. His life has been a singularly consistent unity. We can look back from the "direct primary" campaign in New Jersey in 1911 to the International Review article of 1879, with its assertion of "America's greatest claim to political honour-the right of every man to a voice in the government under which he lives "; or from the Tariff legislation in 1913 to the declaration made in 1882 by the junior partner in the firm of Renick and Wilson to a tariff commission visiting Atlanta, that "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 it was election to the Presidency of Princeton that first put administrative power into his hands and enabled him to give concrete application to those principles and doctrines he was later to vindicate before the world on a larger stage.

The keynotes of Mr. Wilson's public career may be stated, at a certain sacrifice of completeness in the interests of brevity, as a profound faith

in democracy and an indomitable enthusiasm for reform. At Princeton the established order was aristocratic and conservative. Conservatism is a common attribute of universities, and in America it is accentuated (though there are other counterbalancing forces) by the close association maintained between a college and its alumni, or former graduates, who naturally tend to turn a suspicious eye on threatened innovations. Dr. Wilson was under no illusions as to the task that faced him. His twelve years as professor had given him ample time to develop his convictions as to what Princeton might and should be, and to realize the gulf that separated the actual from the ideal. He had high visions of the functions of a university in the national life. "We are not at liberty," he maintained, "to use Princeton for our private purposes or to adapt her in any way to our own use and pleasure. It is our bounden duty to make her more and more responsive to the intellectual and moral needs of a great nation." In 1902 Princeton was not so responsive. It was a university for rich men's sons; privilege and luxury— in their best form, indeed, but still privilege and luxury-were entrenched; and the standard of scholastic attainment was unjustifiably low. There was abundant scope for a President who confessed that "if to seek to go to the root is to be a radical, a radical I am." It was after he had held the presidency for some years that he told the Pittsburg alumni that "the colleges of this country must be reconstructed from top to bottom, and America is going to demand it"; but the