President Wilsons Addresses | Page 3

the war and entitled America and Freedom.
Like a strong current through these works runs the doctrine that in a
good government the law-making power should be also the
administering power and should bear full and specific responsibility;
safeguards against ill-considered action being provided in two
directions, by the people on the one hand, and on the other hand by law
and custom, these latter being considered historically, as an organic
growth. He finds the elements and essentials of this doctrine in our
Constitution, though somewhat obscured by the old "literary" theory of
checks and balances. He finds it more fully acknowledged in the British
Constitution. He finds it originating in our English race, enunciated at
Runnymede, developing by a slow but natural growth in English

history, sanctioned in the Petition of Right, the Revolution of 1688, and
the Declaration of Rights, achieved for us in our own Revolution, and
illustrated by the implied powers of Congress and the more directly
exercised powers of the House of Commons. It is a corollary of this
doctrine that the President of the United States, to whom in the veto
and in his peculiar relations to the Senate our Constitution gives a very
real legislative function, should associate himself closely with
Congress, not merely as one who may annul but also as one who
initiates policies and helps to translate them into laws. In his
Congressional Government, begun when he was a student in Princeton
and finished before he was twenty-eight years old, Mr. Wilson clearly
indicates his dissatisfaction with the tradition which would set the
executive apart from the legislative power as a check against it and not
a coöperating element; and it is a remarkable proof of the man's
integrity and persistent personality that one of his first acts as President
was to go before the Congress as if he were its agent.
If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his
rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that
the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public
opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of
governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the
rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century
and have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the
Continent of Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this
country, as a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all
that concerns jurisprudence, we Americans belong.
The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined
legislative-administrative power is, he declares, national respect for the
spirit of those general legal conceptions which, through many centuries,
have been making themselves part and parcel of our racial instinct. He
perceives that the British Constitution, though unwritten, is as effective
as ours and commands obedience fully as much as ours, and that both
appeal to a certain ingrained legal sense, common to all the
English-speaking peoples. These peoples do not really have revolutions.
What we call the American Revolution was only the reaffirming of

principles which were as precious in the eyes of most Englishmen as
they were in the eyes of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, but
which had been for a time and owing to peculiar circumstances,
neglected or contravened. Political development in this family of
nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by evolution.
On all these points his Constitutional Government in the United States
is only a richer and more mature statement and illustration of the ideas
expressed in his Congressional Government. The main thesis of his
George Washington is that the great Virginian and first American was
the truest Englishman of his time, a modern Hampden or Eliot, a Burke
in action. Again and again he pays respect to Chief Justice Marshall,
who represented, in our early history, the conception of law as
something in its breadth and majesty older and more sacred than the
decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable of being so
interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson has from
the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke has
been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of book
and teacher is significant. Mere Literature shows how Mr. Wilson
revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their
lessons well. In An Old Master and Other Essays, he had already borne
witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as
compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics
the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by
organic processes.
Mr. Wilson's Division and Reunion is an admirable treatment of a
question upon which a Southerner might