It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institutions of one country will not suit another country; but how infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why?
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
But it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of the effect he is seeking to expound.
He may let some anecdote escape him which gleams with the very spark needed to kindle his exposition.
In looking only for grave political facts he may overlook some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess.
He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people; whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves.
Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government.
He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it.
The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places has no business taking up a pen to write about government.
If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination.
That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of ‘treatises,’ and exalt them to the patriciate of literature.
The needed reaction against the still ‘orthodox’ methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the ‘orthodox’ political economists, should be a ‘literary movement’--a movement from formalism to…
In order really to know anything about government, you must see it alive; and the object of the writer on politics should be nothing less than this, to paint government to the life, to make it live again upon his page.
If for nothing else than for the sake of a modus vivendi, we must out with whatever notion it is that we have accepted or invented with reference to the nature and lodgement of sovereignty.
It is, on the whole, safer to be explicit than to hedge.
In what we read of sovereignty we are led to wonder if it can be the words that confuse us.
Spencer proceeds to say with all plainness, “Hence it is undeniable that, taken in its widest acceptation, the feeling of the community is the sole source of political power; in those communities, at least, which are not under foreign…
In the United States (so runs the orthodox creed) the People is sovereign.--the verb is singular because the people, under this doctrine, constitute a unit.
And yet it is notorious that they never have acted as a unit, nor ever can act as a unit under our existing constitution.
They must be consulted concerning government, but they do not conduct it.
Voters are simply the agents of the community, they say.
The press and the pulpit, the private argument and the curtain lecture, command--voters, if they are faithful, obey.
Are not the agencies which Judge Jameson calls sovereign after all more active, more self-directed, freer to criticise, to suggest, to insist?
The newspapers, the clergymen, the mass-meeting orators, the urgent friends, the restless, ambitious wives, the pert and forward children can at any rate keep on talking in the intervals, when the electors are reduced to silence, patiently…
Certainly, if we can accept this miscellaneous sovereign of men-women-and-children, the history of sovereignty is much simplified.
This determinate body of persons, the free population, is always present, and always has been present, under all constitutions.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
