s, the ghosts of compromises, would-be everybodies--men who
had not decided who they were, and who could not settle down and let
people know which of their characters they had hit on at last to be
really theirs, men who had no cutting edge to do things, screw-drivers
trying to be chisels--were revealed to our people at last as vague,
mean, other-worldly persons, not fitting into our real American world at
all, and hopelessly visionary and impracticable in American politics.

And now one more hand-made man has been allowed to us.

The machines run very still in the White House.

The people of this country no longer go by the White House on their way
to their business and just hear it humdrumming and humdrumming behind
the windows as of yore. The nation stands in crowds around the gates and
would like to see in. The people wonder. They wonder a million columns a
day what is inside.

What is inside?

An American who governs by being news, himself.

The first thing that the people demand from our President now is that he
shall be news himself. The news that they have selected to know first
during the next four years--have put into the White House to know first
is Woodrow Wilson.

"Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God's name?" the steeples and smoking
chimneys, the bells and whistles, the Yales and Harvards, and the little
country schools, the crowds in the streets, and the corn in the fields
all say, "Who Are You?"

Then the people listen. They listen to his "I wills" and "I won'ts" for
news about him. They look for news about him in the headlines he steers
into the papers every morning, in the events he makes happen, in the
editorials he makes men think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the
National Wire--in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their
long, patient, hopeful answer to their question, "Who Are You, Woodrow
Wilson?"

CHAPTER VII

THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?"

But if the President governs first by being news himself, he governs
second by his appointments, by gathering about him other men who are
news to people, too.

One need not divide people into good and bad, because the true line of
division between good and bad instead of being between one man and
another, is apt to be as a matter of fact and experience cut down
through the middle of each of us.

But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting good
things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over