vent of worldwide significance. Our
revolutionary ancestors set up a government founded on a new principle,
happily phrased by Jefferson in the statement that governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed. This principle
threatened, although remotely, the existence of the aristocratic
governments of the Old World which were still based on the doctrine of
divine right. The entrance of the United States into the World War was
an event of equal significance because it gave an American president,
who was thoroughly grounded in the political philosophy of the Virginia
Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the writings of
the founders of the Republic, an opportunity to proclaim to the world
the things for which America has always stood. In this connection H.
W. V. Temperley in "A History of the Peace Conference of Paris" (vol.
i, page 173) says: "The utterances of President Wilson have a unique
significance, not only because they were taken as the legal basis of
the Peace negotiations, but because they form a definite and coherent
body of political doctrine. This doctrine, though developed and
expanded in view of the tremendous changes produced by the war, was not
formed or even altered by them. His ideas, like those of no other
great statesman of the war, are capable of being worked out as a
complete political philosophy. A peculiar interest, therefore,
attaches to his pre-war speeches, for they contain the germs of his
political faith and were not influenced by the terrifying portents of
to-day. The tenets in themselves were few and simple, but their
consequences, when developed by the war, were such as to produce the
most far-reaching results. It is not possible or necessary to discuss
how far these tenets were accepted by the American people as a whole,
for, as the utterances of their legal representative at a supreme
moment of world history, they will always retain their value."

The principal features of Wilson's political philosophy were revealed
in his policy toward Latin America before he had any idea of
intervening in the European situation. At the outset of his
administration he declared that the United States would "never again
seek one additional foot of territory by conquest." In December, 1915,
he declared: "From the first we have made common cause with all
partisans of liberty on this side of the sea and . . . have set America
aside as a whole for the uses of i