est History_

Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office as President on March 4, 1913,
after one of the most sweeping triumphs ever known in Presidential
elections. Factional war in the Republican Party had given him 435
electoral votes in the preceding November, to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's
8; and though he was a "minority President," he had had a popular
plurality of more than 2,000,000 over Roosevelt and nearly 3,000,000
over Taft.

Moreover, the party which was coming back into control of the
Government after sixteen years of wandering in the wilderness had a
majority of five in the Senate and held more than two-thirds of the
seats in the lower house. With the opposition divided into two wings,
which hated each other at the moment more than they hated the
Democrats, the party seemed to have a fairly clear field for the
enactment of those sweeping reforms which large elements of the public
had been demanding for more than a decade.

With this liberalism, which was not disturbed at being called
radicalism, Mr. Wilson in his public career had been consistently
identified. During his long service as a university professor and
President he had been brought to the attention of a steadily growing
public by his books and speeches on American political problems, in
which he had spoken the thoughts which in those years were in the minds
of millions of Americans on the need for reforms to lessen those
contacts between great business interests and the Government which had
existed, now weaker and now stronger, ever since the days of Mark
Hanna.

The ideas of Mr. Wilson as to governmental reform, to be sure, went
further than those of many of his followers, and took a different
direction from the equally radical notions of others. An avowed admirer
of the system of government which gives to the Cabinet the direction of
legislation and makes it responsible to the Legislature and the people
for its policies, he had been writing for years on the desirability of
introducing some of the elements of that system into the somewhat rigid
framework of the American Government, and in his brief experience in
politics had put into practice his theory that the Executive, even
under American constitutional forms, not only could but should be the
active director of the policy of the dominant party in legislation as
well. But a public addicted to hero worship, little concerned with
questions of governmental machinery, and inclined to believe