President Wilsons Addresses | Page 5

sufficiently hospitable to
foreign ideas, especially to the vast body of comment on the French
Revolution. I imagine few Continental authorities would agree with
him in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of that great
movement, which he seems to regard with almost unmitigated
disapproval.
In Mr. Wilson's addresses and public letters concerning the War he
re-affirms his principles and applies them with high confidence to the
fateful problems of this time. His tone has become vastly deeper and
sounder since he made his great decision, and from his Speech to
Congress, on February 3, 1917, to his recent Baltimore appeal, it has
rung true to every good impulse in the hearts of our people. His letter to
the Pope is in every way his master-piece, in style, in temper, and in

power of thought. He has led his country to the place it ought to occupy,
by the side of that other English democracy whose institutions, ideals,
and destiny are almost identical with our own, as he has demonstrated
in the writings of half a lifetime. Let us hope there was prophetic virtue
in a passage of his Constitutional Government, where, speaking of the
relation between our several States and the Union that binds them
together, he says they "may yet afford the world itself the model of
federation and liberty it may in God's providence come to seek."
No one can rise from a perusal of the great mass of Mr. Wilson's
writings without an almost oppressive sense of his unremitting and
strenuous industry. From his senior year in college to the present day
he has borne the anxieties and responsibilities of authorship. The work
has been done with extreme conscientiousness in regard to accuracy
and clearness of thinking and with sedulous care for justness and
beauty of expression. It might well crown a life with honor. And when
we remember the thousands of his college lectures and the hundreds of
his miscellaneous addresses which have found no record in print, when
we recall the labors of university administration which crowded upon
him in middle life, when we consider the spectacle of his calm, prompt,
orderly, and energetic performance of public duty in these latter years,
our admiration for the literary artist is enhanced by our profound
respect for the man.[A]
[A] A considerable part of this Introduction appeared originally as an
article in The Princeton Alumni Weekly.

PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESSES

FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS
[Delivered at the Capitol, in Washington, March 4, 1913.]
There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when
the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive

majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble
will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President
have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean?
That is the question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the
question I am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the
occasion.
It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a
party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large
and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the
Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to
interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things
with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into
the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect
as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened
eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and
sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to
comprehend their real character, have come to assume the aspect of
things long believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We
have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.
We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably
great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and
sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and
built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of
groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral force. Nowhere
else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more striking
forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and
counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the
weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a
great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in
many respects a model