In the “Wealth of Nations” every apparent induction leads to self-interest, and to self-interest alone.
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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Adam Smith took strong hold upon his hearers, as he still takes strong hold upon his readers, by force, partly, of his native sagacity, but by virtue, principally, of his consummate style.
He was a great thinker,--and that was much; but he also made men recognize him as a great thinker, because he was a great master of style--which was more.
He did not put his candle under a bushel, but on a candlestick.
It is this power of teaching other men how to think that has given to the works of Adam Smith an immortality of influence.
The things that strike us most about him are, his boldness of conception and wideness of outlook, his breadth and comprehensiveness of treatment, and his carefully clarified and beautified style.
But no matter who mined the gold, he coined it; the image and superscription are his.
Certain separate, isolated truths which served under him may have been doing individual, guerilla warfare elsewhere for the advancement of science; but it was he who marshalled them into drilled hosts for the conquering of the nations.
Education and the world of thought need men who, like this man, will dare to know a multitude of things.
In this day of narrow specialties, our thinking needs such men to fuse its parts, correlate its forces, and centre its results; and our thinking needs them in its college stage, in order that we may command horizons from our study windows…
His sentences cannot retain the stiff joints of logic; it would be death to them to wear the chains of formal statement; they must take leave to deck themselves with eloquence.
By reason of the very strength of their humanity, they are enabled to say things long waiting to be said, in such a way that all men may receive them.
Their protest is significant, their purpose heroic, beyond a doubt; and what interesting questions are not raised by their programme!
The most interesting reflection suggested by the situation is, that political economists are being harassed by the same discipline of experience that, one day or another, sobers all constructors of systems.
They cannot build in the air and then escape chagrin because men only gaze at their structures, and will not live in them.
Closet students of politics are constantly undergoing new drill in the same lesson: the world is an inexorable schoolmaster; it will have none of any thought which does not recognize it.
They do not vote their opinions, they vote their party tickets; and they are the better citizens by far for doing so.
But the trouble is, that when they turn from voting to writing they call many of their abstract reflections on government studies of politics, and thereby lose the benefit of some very wholesome aids to just thought.
The inherent weakness of such a method is shown by the readiness with which it is discredited when once a better one is put beside it.
What modern writer on political institutions has not felt, either directly or indirectly, the influence of de Tocqueville and Bagehot?
Both these inimitable writers were men of extraordinary genius, and, whatever they might have written about, their writings would have been admiringly preserved, if only for the wonder of their luminous qualities.
They could see institutions writ small in the most trivial turns of politics, and read constitutions more clearly in a biography than in a statute-book.
They were men who, had they written history, would have written the history of peoples, and not of courts or parliaments merely.
Their methods have, therefore, because of their essential sanity, gone far toward discrediting all others; they have leavened the whole mass of political literature.
The active statesman is often an incomparable teacher, however, when he is himself least conscious that he is teaching at all, when he has no thought of being didactic, but has simply a heart full of the high purpose of leading his…
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
