But at least he was moving towards a definite objective, and an objective so an objective so pregnant with beneficent possibilities for humanity that if ever his hopes were realized his part in the work of establishing peace would give him an imperishable name among the handful of men whose efforts have lifted the world to new moral levels.

This is not the time to idealize President Wilson. He is in the midst of his work, and he cannot be judged by it till he has succeeded or failed in carrying it through. He has had the interim reward of being sent back by his countrymen to finish what he has begun, and he has no title to ask more of them or of mankind yet than that his endeavours should be given free scope, and that both appreciative and adverse critics should for a while suspend their verdicts. That does not mean that there is no place for sober judgments on so much of a political career as is already part of history. It has been the aim of the present writer to provide a basis for such judgments. If this volume has been worth writing at all, it is because a plain record of a man's concrete actions through sixteen years of public, and six of definitely political, life affords a surer revelation of his principles and aims than the most acute and detailed psychological analysis.

President Wilson has not yet discarded, it may be that he never will discard, a certain academic chill that limits his personal appeal to the multitude, as compared, for example, with Mr.

Roosevelt's. It is something of the same contrast seen in English politics between such men as Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George-though that comparison must not be carried beyond the point it is cited to illustrate. But whatever else Woodrow Wilson will stand for in history, posterity will look back to him as the exponent of a great political creed. No statesman living to-day has more consistently, more resolutely, or with deeper conviction applied in the government of a great commonwealth the lessons of a discerning, a sober, and a constructive liberalism. If his possible influence on the future is to be rightly gauged, it must be estimated in the light of his unconcealed aspiration to promote the application to the government of the world of the principles he has for four years applied to the government of America.

"I hope and believe," he said in his address to the Senate on the conditions of a world peace, “that I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of every programme of liberty. I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out." Such words, in the President's mouth, call for a wider interpretation than the special circumstances attending their utterance suggest. They betoken an unashamed idealism-and idealists in high places have in the course of history done as much to retard as to promote the progress of mankind. Mr. Wilson has four clear years in which to

justify his aims. By the time he takes his final leave of the White House we shall be better able than we are to-day to foreshadow the permanent verdict of history on his exercise of power.

APPENDIX

AMERICA AND WORLD-POLITICS

THE fullest expression of President Wilson's conception of the future rôle of the United States in international politics is to be found in his address to the Senate on January 21, 1917, and his second Inaugural on March 5, 1917. Speaking, in the one case to the assembly particularly associated with him by the Constitution and by usage in the direction of foreign policy, and in the other to the nation as a whole, the President enunciated principles whose acceptance would involve, in some respects the profound modification, in others the complete supersession, of the Monroe Doctrine.

The new policy thus unfolded had been foreshadowed in Mr. Wilson's declarations on the proposed League to Enforce Peace and in his address to the Pan-American Scientific Conference in January 1916, but it had never before been worked out in all its fullness in the light of the lessons of the European War. A leader who called on America to abandon frankly and irrevocably the detachment and isolation that for ninety years had been the corner-stone of her foreign policy was making heavy demands on