ct, 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
J