that
certain parts of the work of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had
been accomplished under divine inspiration, had comparatively little
interest in the Wilson concepts of reform in political methods. They
regarded him, in the language of those days, as a champion of the
"plain people" against "the interests." They had seen in his long
struggle with antagonistic influences in Princeton University--a
struggle from which he retired defeated, but made famous and prepared
for wider fields by the publicity which he had won by the conflict--a
sort of miniature representation of this antithesis between the people
and big business and they had learned to regard Mr. Wilson as a fighter
for democratic principles against aristocratic tendencies and the money
power.

This reputation he had vastly expanded during his two years as Governor
of New Jersey. His term had been distinguished not only by the passage
of a number of reform measures consonant with the liberal ideas of the
period, but by a spectacular struggle between the Governor and an
old-time machine of his own party--the very machine which had nominated
him. In this fight, as in his conflict at Princeton, he had been for a
time defeated, but here again the fight itself had made him famous and
won him a hundred supporters outside of his own State for every one he
lost at home.

At the very outset of his term, he had entered, against all precedent,
into the fight in the Legislature over a Senatorial election. Demanding
that the Legislature keep faith with the people, who in a preferential
primary had designated a candidate for United States Senator who did
not command the support of the organization, he had won his fight on
this particular issue and set himself before the public as a sort of
tribune of the people who conceived it his duty to interpose his
influence wherever other officials showed a tendency to disregard the
popular will.

In the legislative fight for the enactment of reform legislation, too,
the Governor had continually intervened in the character of "lobbyist
for the people," and while the opposition of the old political
organization, which he had aroused in the fight for the Senatorship,
had partially halted the progress of this program, the great triumph in
November, 1912, had returned a Legislature so strong in support of the
Governor that before he left Trenton for Washington practically all of
the measures included in his scheme had become