A nation that can quietly reabsorb a vast victorious army is no more safely free and healthy than is a nation that could reabsorb such a President as Andrew Jackson, sending him into seclusion at the Hermitage to live without power, and…
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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Thoughts which in one quarter kindle enthusiasm may in another meet coolness or arouse antagonism.
Generous emotions sometimes sweep whole peoples, but, happily, evil passions, sinister views, base purposes, do not and cannot.
Sedition cannot surge through the hearts of a wakeful nation as patriotism can.
The sweep of agitations set afoot for purposes unfamiliar or uncongenial to the customary popular thought is broken by a thousand obstacles.
It may be easy to reawaken old enthusiasms, but it must be infinitely hard to create new ones, and impossible to surprise a whole people into unpremeditated action.
It is well to give full weight to these great advantages of our big and strenuous and yet familiar way of conducting affairs; but it is imperative at the same time to make very plain the influences which are pointing toward changes in our…
The union of strength with bigness depends upon the maintenance of character, and it is just the character of the nation which is being most deeply affected and modified by the enormous immigration which, year after year, pours into the…
We are unquestionably facing an ever-increasing difficulty of self-command with ever-deteriorating materials, possibly with degenerating fibre.
We are not now simply carrying out under normal conditions the principles and habits of English constitutional history.
Europe has sent her habits to us, and she has sent also her political philosophy, a philosophy which has never been purged by the cold bath of practical politics.
Not only printing and steam and electricity have gotten hold of us to expand our English civilization, but also those general, and yet to us alien, forces of democracy of which mention has already been made; and these are apt to tell…
They may require as much political capacity for their proper solution as any that confronted the architects of our government.
But every added element of variety, particularly every added element of foreign variety, complicates even the simpler questions of politics.
The dangers attending that variety which is heterogeneity in so vast an organism as ours are, of course, the dangers of disintegration--nothing less; and it is unwise to think these dangers remote and merely contingent because they are not…
We are conscious of oneness as a nation, of vitality, of strength, of progress; but are we often conscious of common thought in the concrete things of national policy?
Are we not, rather, dimly aware of being pulled in a score of directions by a score of crossing influences, a multitude of contending forces?
This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led; its giant faculties must be schooled and directed.
Leadership cannot belong to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can groups of communities.
We speak of the sovereignty of the people, but that sovereignty, we know very well, is of a peculiar sort; quite unlike the sovereignty of a king or of a small, easily concerting group of confident men.
It passes judgment or gives sanction, but it cannot direct or suggest.
Questions of government are infinitely complex questions, and no multitude can of themselves form clear-cut, comprehensive, consistent conclusions touching them.
Yet without such conclusions, without single and prompt purposes, government cannot be carried on.
Neither legislation nor administration can be done at the ballot box.
The people can only accept the governing act of representatives.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
