e influence of Colonel Edward Mandell House, a
private citizen who had risen from making Governors at Austin to take a
prominent part in the making of a President in 1912. At the beginning
of the Administration and throughout almost all of President Wilson's
tenure of office he was the President's most influential adviser, a
sort of super-Minister and Ambassador in general; and his position from
the first caused a certain amount of heartburning among the politicians
who resented this prominence of an outsider who had never held office.

Perhaps because many of his official aids and assistants were more or
less imposed upon him, the President showed from the first a tendency
to rely on personal agents and unofficial advisers. And this was to
become more prominent as the years passed, as new issues arose of which
no one would have dreamed in the Spring of 1913, issues for which the
ordinary machinery and practice of American Government were but little
prepared.

For the eight years which began on March 4, 1913, were to be wholly
unlike any previous period in American history. An Administration
chosen wholly in view of domestic problems was to find itself chiefly
engaged with foreign relations of unexampled complexity and importance.
The passionate issues of 1912 were soon to be forgotten. Generally
speaking, the dominant questions before the American people in 1912 and
1913 were about the same as in 1908, or 1904, or even earlier. But from
1914 on every year brought a changed situation in which the issues of
the previous year had already been crowded out of attention by new and
more pressing problems.

No American President except Lincoln had ever been concerned with
matters of such vital importance to the nation; and not even Lincoln
had had to deal with a world so complex and so closely interrelated
with the United States. Washington, Jefferson and Madison had to guide
the country through the complications caused by a great world war; but
the nation which they led was small and obscure, concerned only in
keeping out of trouble as long as it could. The nation which Wilson
ruled was a powerful State whose attitude from the very first was of
supreme importance to both sides. And the issues raised by the war
pushed into the background questions which had seemed important in
1913--and which, when the war was over, became important once more.

None of this, of course, could have been predicted on March 4, 1913. A
new man