les and applies them with high confidence to the
fateful problems of this time. His tone has become vastly deeper and
sounder since he made his great decision, and from his Speech to
Congress, on February 3, 1917, to his recent Baltimore appeal, it has
rung true to every good impulse in the hearts of our people. His letter
to the Pope is in every way his master-piece, in style, in temper, and
in power of thought. He has led his country to the place it ought to
occupy, by the side of that other English democracy whose institutions,
ideals, and destiny are almost identical with our own, as he has
demonstrated in the writings of half a lifetime. Let us hope there was
prophetic virtue in a passage of his _Constitutional Government_, where,
speaking of the relation between our several States and the Union that
binds them together, he says they "may yet afford the world itself the
model of federation and liberty it may in God's providence come to
seek."
No one can rise from a perusal of the great mass of Mr. Wilson's
writings without an almost oppressive sense of his unremitting and
strenuous industry. From his senior year in college to the present day
he has borne the anxieties and responsibilities of authorship. The work
has been done with extreme conscientiousness in regard to accuracy and
clearness of thinking and with sedulous care for justness and beauty of
expression. It might well crown a life with honor. And when we remember
the thousands of his college lectures and the hundreds of his
miscellaneous addresses which have found no record in print, when we
recall the labors of university administration which crowded upon him in
middle life, when we consider the spectacle of his calm, prompt,
orderly, and energetic performance of public duty in these latter years,
our admiration for the literary artist is enhanced by our profound
respect for the man.[A]
[A] A considerable part of this Introduction appeared originally as an
article in _The Princeton Alumni Weekly_.
PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESSES
FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS
[Delivered at the Capitol, in Washington, March 4, 1913.]
There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the
House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It
has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be
Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put
into the hands of Democrats. What does the change
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