situation which led to Wilson's victory in November, 1912. Wilson, writing a dozen years before the fight between Taft and Roosevelt, had unconsciously drawn a parallel closer perhaps than the facts warranted; and the reader who had been attracted by this similarity read on into Wilson's characterization of Jefferson an introduction to the achievements of his Administration with a growing hope—if he happened to be a Wilson man—that after as before election Wilson's record would duplicate Jefferson's.

Colonel Harvey was as good a prophet in 1913 as in 1904. Wilson's achievement in domestic affairs in the first year of his Administration was not likely to suffer much by comparison with Jefferson's. But it could not have crossed anybody's mind in March, 1913, that complications of international politics such as had almost ruined the country under Jefferson would in the latter part of Wilson's first term expose him to as much criticism as Jefferson, and for the same reasons.

America was still new as a world power, but was beginning to feel more at home. In Taft's Administration, with Philander C. Knox as Secretary of State, there had been for the first time the beginnings of what might fairly be called a consistent foreign policy. True, it was not a very lofty policy, nor was it by any means generally approved in America. It was called by its friends "dollar diplomacy," meaning the promotion of American commercial interests by diplomatic agencies. It had been exemplified principally in Central America, where its operations had not always commanded admiration, and in China, where Knox had made a well-intentioned but not very skillful effort to prevent the absorption of Manchuria by Russia and Japan.