It is an organic principle,--a principle of life, renewing and being renewed.
Woodrow Wilson
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.
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Democratic institutions are never done; they are like living tissue, always a-making.
It is a strenuous thing, this of living the life of a free people; and our success in it depends upon training, not upon clever invention.
Our democracy, plainly, was not a body of doctrine; it was a stage of development.
Our democratic state was not a piece of developed theory, but a piece of developed habit.
It was not created by mere aspirations or by new faith; it was built up by slow custom.
An immature people could not have had it, and the maturity to which it was vouchsafed was the maturity of freedom and self-control.
Such government as ours is a form of conduct, and its only stable foundation is character.
A particular form of government may no more be adopted than a particular type of character maybe adopted: both institutions and character must be developed by conscious effort and through transmitted aptitudes.
Governments such as ours are founded upon discussion, and government by discussion comes as late in political as scientific thought in intellectual development.
The people who successfully maintain such a government must have gone through a period of political training which shall have prepared them by gradual steps of acquired privilege for assuming the entire control of their affairs.
Long and slowly widening experience in local self-direction must have prepared them for national self-direction.
When practised, not by small communities, but by wide nations, democracy, far from being a crude form of government, is possible only amongst peoples of the highest and steadiest political habit.
It is the heritage of races purged alike of hasty barbaric passions and of patient servility to rulers, and schooled in temperate common counsel.
It can never be made to sit easily or safely on first generations, but strengthens through long heredity.
It is poison to the infant, but tonic to the man.
Monarchies may be made, but democracies must grow.
Erroneous as it is to represent government as only a commonplace sort of business, little elevated in method above merchandising, and to be regulated by counting-house principles, the favor easily won for such views among our own people is…
It gives voice to the eminently modern democratic feeling that government is no hidden cult, to be left to a few specially prepared individuals, but a common, every-day concern of life, even if the biggest such concern.
He has missed that most obvious teaching of events, that successful democracy differs from unsuccessful in being a product of history,--a product of forces not suddenly become operative, but slowly working upon whole peoples for…
The level of democracy is the level of every-day habit, the level of common national experiences, and lies far below the elevations of ecstasy to which the revolutionist climbs.
Modern science, scarcely less than our pliancy and steadiness in political habit, may be said to have created the United States of to-day.
It is impossible among us to hatch in a corner any plot which will affect more than a corner.
With life everywhere throughout the continent, it is impossible to seize illicit power over the whole people by seizing any central offices.
He held his office by orderly election; he exercised its functions within the letter of the law; he could silence not one word of hostile criticism; and, his second term expired, he passed into private life as harmlessly as did James…
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
