epublicans should during the
ensuing Administration succeed in burying their differences and coming
together once more, the odds were in favor of their success in 1916.
Moreover, the Democrats were definitely expected to do something.
Dissatisfaction with the general influence of financial interests in
public life, a dissatisfaction which had gradually concentrated on the
protective tariff as the chief weapon of those interests, had been
growing for years past. In 1908 a public aroused by Roosevelt but
afraid of Bryan had decided to trust the Republican Party to undo its
own work, and the answer of the party had been the Payne-Aldrich
tariff. That tariff broke the Republican Party in two and paved the way
for the return of Roosevelt; it had also, in 1910, given the Democrats
the control of the House of Representatives.

Now, at last the Democrats had full control of both Legislature and
Executive, and the country expected them to do something: unreasonably,
it was at the same time rather afraid that they would do something. To
do something but not too much, to meet the popular demands without
destroying the economic well-being which the Republican ascendency had
undoubtedly promoted, to insure a better distribution of wealth without
crippling the production of wealth--this was the problem of a President
who had had only two years in public life, and most of whose assistants
would have to be chosen from men almost without executive experience.

The chief peculiarity of President Wilson's political position lay in a
theory of American Government which had first come to him in his
undergraduate days at Princeton and which had been steadily developing
ever since. That theory, briefly, was that the American Constitution
permitted, and the practical development of American politics should
have compelled, the President to act not only as Chief of State but as
Premier--as the active head of the majority party, personally
responsible to the people for the execution of the program of
legislation laid down in that party's platform. Fanciful as it had
seemed when first put forward by him many years before, that concept of
the Presidency was now, perhaps for the first time, within the reach of
practical realization.

Dissatisfaction with the general secrecy and irresponsibility of
Congressional committees which had charge of the direction of
legislation, in so far as there was any direction, had been growing for
years; and an inc