fession of faith. He opposed the tariff: "Now that peace has come, the people of the South will insist upon having the fruits of peace and not being kept down under the burdens of war." He went on to show the unwisdom of laying any tax except for urgent needs; a tax laid for other purposes is bad policy and class legislation. Still, he would not abandon tariffs for revenue. The people had too long been accustomed to indirect taxation. This was a pronouncement in full accord with his sectional faith as well as with the results of his long studies of British public affairs. Nine of every ten men in the South held the same view and longed for the day when they could compel the industrial interests of the North to take better care of themselves and take less direct or indirect aid from the treasury.

The time had come for Wilson to try another calling. It was plain that the law was not for him. He went to the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in September, 1883, and there once more renewed formally his contact with learning. His ideas for a treatise on congressional government, developing the thought of the article of 1879, were still in mind. He put himself under the guidance of Professor Herbert B. Adams, one of the most stimulating teachers known to American educational history. There were other young men of similar minds at the new university, James Franklin Jameson, Albert Shaw, Frederic J. Turner, Albion W. Small, John Dewey, and others of whom the world has heard a great deal. No more remarkable group of students than those who worked with Adams in his earlier years at Johns Hopkins has appeared in our history.

Adams had come but recently from Germany where he had been imbued with the best spirit of that country. The new

"Report of the Tariff Commission," House "Miscellaneous Reports" 2nd Sess. 47th Cong., Vol. III, 1294.

university had for its president Daniel Coit Gilman, another man who was overcome with the sense of the American need for accurate scholarship and first-hand research. The seminar was the method. There were no residential halls and what is called college spirit hardly existed. Only the spirit of research prevailed. Under such a régime, Wilson must have found benefit, even if he had not already failed at law and felt the instant need of things. Within two years, he had met the conditions for the doctorate although he was not desirous of actually receiving the Ph.D. degree, and his study soon to be known as "Congressional Government" was accepted.1

It was his real début into the world of scholarship and a remarkable book indeed it was for a young man of twentynine. It was the idea of 1879 developed to its logical conclusions. Its plea was that congressional government was in a sad state, that only positive reform in the way of responsible leadership could save it. But if it were saved it would not be congressional government; it would be cabinet government after the British model. Although the book was exceedingly well done, entirely independent in thinking, and written in a style that might save many another dissertation of infinitely less value, the author had not after all drawn the conclusion to which his study pointed.

If direct and open responsibility for the policies of democratic government be absolutely necessary, then the elaborate scheme of checks and balances set up by the fathers of 1787, designed to prevent things from being done rather than to forward things that needed to be done, must go. If the president must shape and guide legislation and stand

Woodrow Wilson, "Congressional Government," Boston, 1885. Professor Stockton Axson informs the writer that Wilson did not expect to apply for the doctorate. It was the interest taken by Miss Thomas, then dean of Bryn Mawr College, that induced him to take the examination and receive the degree.

or fall with the people according to the measure of success attained, then the shirking of responsibility through division of authority, house, senate, and supreme court, must cease. That would be democracy such as the English were already approaching and such as the American system was daily defeating.

But to this radical, if logical conclusion, young Wilson, aristocratic and conservative as he was, did not think of proceeding. He had made his contribution; he was ready for the next turn in his career and he took it, leaving to the political doctors to determine what reforms should be applied to the rickety Federal system in Washington. His book was well received by all the critics; it went through many editions during the next decades, but there is no sign that any congressman ever read it. Certainly none ever took serious note of it till nearly thirty years later when the author sat in the White House and men began to cast about to learn what manner of man the new President was.

It was not long before opportunities came to the author of "Congressional Government" to take positions in different colleges. He accepted the position of associate professor of history and political science in Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and there he took up the work he was to pursue during the succeeding eighteen years. It was significant of the future, perhaps, that his first position was in a woman's college.

Meanwhile, the vows to Miss Axson had not been forgotten. On June 24, 1885, they were married at her grandfather's house in Savannah. Their honeymoon was spent in the mountains of North Carolina, near Waynesville, where gentlemen and ladies of South Carolina and Georgia had spent vacations and honeymoons for a hundred years or more. The next autumn the young couple took up their residence

near Philadelphia, and Wilson began the work of teaching the art and science of government to young ladies. He began his career very near where his paternal grandfather had begun nearly a hundred years before and not far from Princeton where his great triumphs, as well as his sorest trials, were to take place.

CHAPTER II

THE NEW ROAD TO LEADERSHIP

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE was in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Its doors had only a short time before been opened. There was every opportunity for its president and board of control to set themselves to new tasks, to improvement and reform, and doubtless Wilson felt that the way was open. At any rate, the limitations of the legal profession, as he had felt them in Atlanta, could not apply.

But Philadelphia was already bound hand and foot to the great Pennsylvania machine whose master was Don Cameron. And in Pennsylvania men had gone a long way from those ideals which Franklin had set up and which Lincoln temporarily restored in 1860. The conventions of Georgia could not have been more stifling than were the limitations of the new environment. Nor was there more freedom across the river in New Jersey. The whole North was in 1885 caught in that full and driving current which made men behave in essential things just as the Southerners had behaved under the heavy pressure of slavery.

In such a world the young lawyer-professor had little to do but stick to his last. For the moment all his ideas, as expressed in "Congressional Government," were abandoned, save as they might be pressed upon the young women of well-to-do families who attended his lectures. He was simply a teacher; and three years of successful study and teaching followed. From Bryn Mawr he went to Wesleyan