The Public Record
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to New Jersey, where he became a prominent political figure. Wilson was a key leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for reforms such as antitrust legislation and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. His presidency is also noted for significant events such as the United States' involvement in World War I and his efforts to promote the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preventing future conflicts.
We are expected to put the utmost energy of every power that we have into the service of our fellow-men, never sparing ourselves, not condescending to think of what is going to happen to ourselves, but ready, if need be, to go to the utter…
The time during which a consul may be unavoidably detained at his post while waiting for a conveyance to the United States, after delivering up the office, may be included in his home transit so far as not to exceed in all the maximum time…
I therefore come to ask your approval that I should use the armed forces of the United States in such ways and to such an extent as may be necessary to obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the fullest recognition of the rights and…
We seek to maintain the dignity and authority of the United States only because we wish always to keep our great influence unimpaired for the uses of liberty, both in the United States and wherever else it may be employed for the benefit…
There can in what we do be no thought of aggression or of selfish aggrandizement.
I have come to ask you for the repeal of that provision of the Panama Canal Act of August 24, 1912, which exempts vessels engaged in the coastwise trade of the United States from payment of tolls.
We are too big, too powerful, too self-respecting a nation to interpret with a too strained or refined reading the words of our own promises.
No communication I have addressed to the Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching implications as to the interest of the country.
as the conditions on which the Proclamation of March 14, 1912, was based have essentially changed, and as it is desirable to place the United States with reference to the exportation of arms or munitions of war to Mexico in the same…
We lose, we do not gain, by putting powers of radically different sorts together into the same categories, and driving them abreast, as if they pulled together, in the same propositions.
There is no unlimited power, except the sum of all powers.
Sovereignty, if it be a definite and separable thing at all, is not unlimited power; is not identical with the powers of the community.
Sovereigns have always been subject in greater or less degree to the community; have always been organs of the State; have never been the State itself.
But they have been sovereigns none the less; they, and not the community over which they presided.
It is necessary, if there is to be any clear thinking at all upon this subject, to distinguish very sharply two radically different things; namely, the powers and processes of governing, on the one hand, from the relations of the people to…
Those relations are relations of assent and obedience; and the degree of assent and obedience marks in every case the limits, that is, the sphere, of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is the daily operative power of framing and giving efficacy to laws.
It is none the less sovereign because it must be observant of the preferences of those whom it governs.
The obedience of the subject has always limited the power of the sovereign.
At all times and under all systems there have been two sets of phenomena visible in government: the phenomena of command and the phenomena of obedience, the phenomena of governing and the phenomena of being governed.
It is a submission of the will--an acquiescence which is either the product of choice, of necessity, or of habit.
We know that the history of politics has been the history of liberty; a history of the enlargement of the sphere of independent individual action at the expense of the sphere of dictatorial authority.
Certain freedoms of opinion and utterance, of choice of occupation and of allegiance, of fair trial and equitable condemnation, have been blocked out as inviolable territories, lying quite beyond the jurisdiction of political sovereignty.
Conditions of submission have been contested, and, as liberty has gained upon authority, have been jealously formulated.
The procedure and the prerogatives of authority have been agreed upon; liberty has encroached upon sovereignty and set bounds to it.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
