rous
under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he
does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer.
Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the
mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has
class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to
be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with
American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical
affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be
reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it.

Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be
in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they
govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical,
and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only
because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can
take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment
as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am
attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment
for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to
class with the men who though important to politics should never hold
high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of
our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.

Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem
that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman)
cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can
at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It
is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as
if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a
means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding
remains almos