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The world, in time, will judge of the amount of knowledge and the degree of purely intellectual force that Mr. Wilson has applied in his field of study. A contemporary cannot well pronounce such a judgment, especially if the province be not his own.

In the small space at my disposal I shall try, first, to say what I think is the political conception or idea upon which Mr. Wilson has looked so steadily and with so deep emotion that he has made of it a poetical subject. And then I shall venture to distinguish those processes of imagination, that artistic method, which we call style, by which he has elucidated its meaning for his readers so as to win for it their intelligent and moved regard. The inquiry will take into account his earliest book, Congressional Government, published in 1885, Division and Reunion, 1893, An Old Master and Other Political Essays, 1893, Mere Literature and Other Essays, 1896, George Washington, 1897, The State, written 1889, rewritten 1898, A History of the American People, 1902, Constitutional Government in the United States, 1908, and a volume, issued very recently in England, containing some of the President's statements on the war and entitled America and Freedom.

Like a strong current through these works runs the doctrine that in a good government the law-making power should be also the administering power and should bear full and specific responsibility; safeguards against ill-considered action being provided in two directions, by the people on the one hand, and on the other hand by law and custom, these latter being considered historically, as an organic growth. He finds the elements and essentials of this doctrine in our Constitution, though somewhat obscured by the old "literary" theory of checks and balances. He finds it more fully acknowledged in the British Constitution. He finds it originating in our English race, enunciated at Runnymede, developing by a slow but natural growth in English history, sanctioned in the Petition of Right, the Revolution of 1688, and the Declaration of Rights, achieved for us in our own Revolution, and illustrated by the implied powers of Congress and the more directly exercised powers of the House of Commons. It is a corollary of this doctrine that the President of the United States, to whom in the veto and in his peculiar relations to the Senate our Constitution gives a very real legislative function, should associate himself closely with Congress, not merely as one who may annul but also as one who initiates policies and helps to translate them into laws. In his Congressional Government, begun when he was a student in Princeton and finished before he was twenty-eight years old, Mr. Wilson clearly indicates his dissatisfaction with the tradition which would set the executive apart from the legislative power as a check against it and not a coöperating element; and it is a remarkable proof of the man's integrity and persistent personality that one of his first acts as President was to go before the Congress as if he were its agent.

If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century and have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the Continent of Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this country, as a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all that concerns jurisprudence, we Americans belong.

The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined legislative-administrative power is, he declares, national respect for the spirit of those general legal conceptions which, through many centuries, have been making themselves part and parcel of our racial instinct. He perceives that the British Constitution, though unwritten, is as effective as ours and commands obedience fully as much as ours, and that both appeal to a certain ingrained legal sense, common to all the English-speaking peoples. These peoples do not really have revolutions. What we call the American Revolution was only the reaffirming of principles which were as precious in the eyes of most Englishmen as they were in the eyes of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar circumstances, neglected or contravened. Political development in this family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by evolution. On all these points his Constitutional Government in the United States is only a richer and more mature statement and illustration of the ideas expressed in his Congressional Government. The main thesis of his George Washington is that the great Virginian and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action. Again and again he pays respect to Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of book and teacher is significant. Mere Literature shows how Mr. Wilson revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their lessons well. In An Old Master and Other Essays, he had already borne witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic processes.

Mr. Wilson's Division and Reunion is an admirable treatment of a question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known text-book The State, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in detail of the functions and objects of government, with special reference to law and its workings. His History of the American People, though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that comes from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repetitious. A great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is insufficient as a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it really is. Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their faults, the administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of enormous difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and intemperance. The disadvantage of having been written originally under pressure in monthly instalments, for a periodical, is clearly visible in the History. There is a too constant effort to catch the eye with picturesque description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others, Mr. Wilson evokes in his readers a noble image of that government, constitutional, traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the days of his youth, aroused in him a poetic