Woodrow Wilson and the World War | Page 7

later.
Wilson's political sentiments are tinged by a constant and intense
interest in the common man. More than once he has insisted that it was
more important to know what was said by the fireside than what was
said in the council chamber. His strongest political weapon, he believes,
has been the appeal over the heads of politicians to public opinion. His
dislike of cliques and his strong prejudice against anything that savors
of special privilege shone clear in his attack upon the Princeton club
system, and the same light has not infrequently dazzled his vision as
President. Thus, while by no means a radical, he instinctively turned to
the support of labor in its struggles with capital because of the abuse of
its privilege by capital in the past and regardless of more recent abuse
of its power by labor. Similarly at the Peace Conference his sympathies
were naturally with every weak state and every minority group.
Such tendencies may have been strengthened by the intensity of his
religious convictions. There have been few men holding high office in
recent times so deeply and constantly affected by Christian faith as
Woodrow Wilson. The son of a clergyman and subjected during his
early years to the most lively and devout sort of Presbyterianism, he
preserved in his own family circle, in later years, a similar atmosphere.
Nor was his conviction of the immanence and spiritual guidance of the
Deity ever divorced from his professional and public life. We can
discover in his presidential speeches many indications of his belief that
the duties he had undertaken were laid upon him by God and that he
might not deviate from what seemed to him the straight and appointed
path. There is something reminiscent of Calvin in the stern and
unswerving determination not to compromise for the sake of ephemeral
advantage. This aspect of Wilson has been caught by a British critic, J.
M. Keynes, who describes the President as a Nonconformist minister,
whose thought and temperament were essentially theological, not

intellectual, "with all the strength and weakness of that manner of
thought, feeling, and expression." The observation is exact, although it
does not in itself completely explain Wilson. Certainly nothing could
be more characteristic of the President than the text of a Baccalaureate
sermon which he preached at Princeton in 1907: "And be ye not
conformed to this world." He believed with intensity that each
individual must set up for himself a moral standard, which he must
rigidly maintain regardless of the opinions of the community.
Entirely natural, therefore, is the emphasis which he has placed,
whether as President of Princeton or of the United States, upon moral
rather than material virtues. This, indeed, has been the essence of his
political idealism. Such an emphasis has been for him at once a source
of political strength and of weakness. The moralist unquestionably
secures wide popular support; but he also wearies his audience, and
many a voter has turned from Wilson in the spirit that led the Athenian
to vote for the ostracism of Aristides, because he was tired of hearing
him called "the Just." Whatever the immediate political effects, the
country owes to Wilson a debt, which historians will doubtless
acknowledge, for his insistence that morality must go hand in hand
with public policy, that as with individuals, so with governments, true
greatness is won by service rather than by acquisition, by sacrifice
rather than by aggression. Wilson and Treitschke are at opposite poles.
During his academic career Wilson seems to have displayed little
interest in foreign affairs, and his knowledge of European politics,
although sufficient for him to produce an admirable handbook on
governments, including foreign as well as our own, was probably not
profound. During his first year in the White House, he was typical of
the Democratic party, which then approved the political isolation of the
United States, abhorred the kind of commercial imperialism summed
up in the phrase "dollar diplomacy," and apparently believed that the
essence of foreign policy was to keep one's own hands clean. The
development of Wilson from this parochial point of view to one which
centers his whole being upon a policy of unselfish international service,
forms, to a large extent, the main thread of the narrative which follows.

CHAPTER II
NEUTRALITY
Despite the wars and rumors of wars in Europe after 1910, few
Americans perceived the gathering of the clouds, and probably not one
in ten thousand felt more than an ordinary thrill of interest on the
morning of June 29, 1914, when they read that the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand of Austria had been assassinated. Nor, a month later, when it
became obvious that the resulting crisis was to precipitate another war
in the Balkans, did most Americans realize that the world was hovering
on