A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one; And those who live as models for the mass Are singly of more value than they all.
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.
gutenberg.org
We shall not again have a true national life until we compact it by such legislative leadership as other nations have.
An acute English historical scholar has said that “the Americans of the United States are a nation because they once obeyed a king;” we shall remain a nation only by obeying leaders.
The fact that it is thus formulated and rendered fixed and definite has seriously misled us, it is to be feared, as to the true function and efficacy of constitutional law.
That law is not made more valid by being written, but only more explicit; it is not rendered more sacred, but only more definite and secure.
Written constitutions are simply more or less successful generalizations of political experience.
They determine forms, utter distinct purposes, set the powers of the State in definite hierarchy; but they do not make the forms they originate workable, or the purposes they utter feasible.
All that must depend upon the men who become governors and upon the people over whom they are set in authority.
Laws can have no other life than that which is given them by the men who administer and the men who obey them.
It consists, accordingly, not of principles newly invented, to be put into operation by means of devices originated for the occasion, but of sound pieces of tested experience.
It has served its purpose beneficently, not because it was written, but because it has proved itself accordant in every essential part with tried principles of government--principles tested by the race for whose use it was intended, and…
Its strength will be found, upon analysis, to lie in its definiteness and in its power to restrain rather than in any unusual excellence of its energetic parts.
For the right operation of these it has had to depend, like other constitutions, upon the virtue and discretion of the people and their ministers.
We possess, therefore, not a more suitable constitution than other countries, but a constitution which is perfectly definite and which is preserved by very formidable difficulties of amendment against inconsiderate change.
The difference between our own case and that of Great Britain upon which we have most reason to congratulate ourselves is that here public opinion has definite criteria for its conservatism; whereas in England it has only shifting and…
We have a fundamental law which is written, and which in its main points is read by all alike in a single accepted sense.
There is no more quarrel about its main intent than there is in England about the meaning of Magna Charta.
Much of the British constitution, on the contrary, has not the support of even a common statute.
We are not more free than the English; we are only more secure.
The definiteness of our Constitution, nevertheless, apart from its outline of structural arrangements and of the division of functions among the several departments of the government, is negative rather than affirmative.
Its very enumeration of the powers of Congress is but a means of indicating very plainly what Congress can not do.
It was a prime necessity in so complex a structure that bounds should be set to authority.
The strength which preserves the system is the strength of self-restraint.
These distinct lines run between power and power will not of their own virtue maintain themselves.
It is not in having such a constitution but in obeying it that our advantage lies.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
