How clamorous was that interest could be heard best when Wilson's own counsels were silenced by illness. Just in time, Woodrow Wilson was able to exert his final prerogative and the scene in which a stricken President received certain Senators to his bedside and heard their case for intervention, only to set it aside, is not without drama. Watchful waiting was resumed.

Wilson was not only a scholar and teacher. With his pen and typewriter, as with his voice, he had the advantages and also the limitations of an artist. His lectures, like his speeches, were easy in diction, gracious in delivery and spontaneous in thought. The gestures were few; the tone, not loud but clear. It is no matter of surprize that youth found fascination in such a professor. The appeal was ever to those virtues of hope, of faith, of fair play, of friendship which youth loves. The trouble in later years lay largely in the fact that he had to deal with men who were no longer young and could not submit either their minds or their wills to such instruction.

Not only in manner of utterance, but in life itself, did he pursue his art. In method as in logic, he sought beauty. What Rembrandt achieved by the utter accuracy of a stroke of his brush, Wilson found in utter punctuality, in the order of his mental pigeon-holes, in doing the right thing, as he saw it,

in the right way and at the right time, in concentration on one subject and detachment from all others. It was his conscious and deliberate way of handling affairs. He cultivated what he called "a single-track mind." And this, again, was a tool, both keen and double-edged.

As an artist, he had temperament. No one except an artist can appreciate quite what that means. In his nature, there were "exposed perceptions" which, like exposed nerves, could feel intensely, not pleasure only but pain. Once let him accept a man as comrade, and the contact developed into affections far more intimate than the business in hand. To differ from such a man was a discomfort and even an agony and to meet the man, after such difference, was an effort. Because he felt too much, Wilson sometimes seemed ungrateful. What might have been merely a rift in argument was treated as a breach of amity. And the Napoleon of altruism sacrificed, one by one, an incomparable staff of devoted marshalls.

Wilson thus gained the ill reputation of "a political ingrate." Broadly the enemies he made or the friends. he estranged fell into classes. First, there were men like Colonel Harvey or some of the bosses," who for their own reasons ran Wilson, whether for the Governorship of New Jersey or the Presidency, undoubtedly contributing to his success, only to find

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later that his idea of the public interest relegated them to the hospitality of a doormat. Secondly, there were intimates in thought and ideal-Walter H. Page, for instance, or Colonel House-who worked with Woodrow Wilson for his own lofty ends, yet were cut off from the heritage of his comradeship with a bare syllable of recognition. The very loyalty with which they accepted the verdict was the measure of its strange severity.

The letters, written by Page as Ambassador in London, are now history and Page has his place in Westminster Abbey. But from those letters, it is obvious that while Page wanted an early intervention by the United States in the war, Wilson insisted on a neutrality extending as he said to the mind itself. When Page came to Washington, Wilson did not want a battle royal on this issue and therefore he did not grant Page an interview in which he feared doubtless that too much might be said on both sides. And, later, a similar situation arose in the case of Colonel House.

Wilson's behavior was determined by his health which for a man, in the rough and tumble of politics, was never robust. From boyhood, onwards, he suffered, when under a strain, from digestive weaknesses, which, for a statesman, are a peculiarly trying handiThere were days when he had to keep quiet;

cap.

it was not pride; it was not rudeness; it was simply physique. The day was too short to greet every Governor who left his card and chat with every Congressman who called. And each moment of the day belonged, not to the President, not to the Governor, not to the Congressman, but to the country. That, at least, was Wilson's view. "The people", he would say, “have elected me to think out their problems' -and thought-too lonely thought, perhaps—was to him a solemn trust.

Wilson's method included utter play as well as utter work. When he relaxed, the relaxation was complete. Over his pleasures, he was as unwilling to compromise as over his principles, and his pleasures were common pleasures. Unlike Gladstone, he never pursued Homer in his spare time. He golfed. He cultivated the movies. At Keith's Vaudeville, he spent regularly an evening a week. He liked pleasant and vivacious company. Above all, he has been, throughout his life, domestic. Wherever he has dwelt, he has made a home. The personality that seemed cold and forbidding to the world, surrendered itself without reserve to the family which grew up around him and especially to his wife of twenty-nine years' association. Ellen Louise Anson was, like her husband, a child of the Manse and to her husband, she bore three daughters. Whatever were Woodrow Wil

son's battles abroad, on his own hearthrug, he met his match in repartee among these young people.

In August, 1914, Woodrow Wilson, having won the White House, was widowed. With Germany marching through Belgium, a President of the United States was called upon to accompany into Georgia all that was left to him of the lady who had loyally partnered him in so many exacting enterprises. It was a heavy blow. But it was more than that. It was a public calamity. Under the Constitution, Wilson could not resign. He had to carry on. Yet he could only carry on if his mind were at ease with itself. In Great Britain, at that very period, private griefs contributed to the interruption of three great careers. Asquith, Grey and Bonar Law were all weakened as public servants because they mourned their nearest and dearest.

It is time, perhaps, to write plainly about Woodrow Wilson's second marriage. It was the family of his former wife that most strongly approved of the decision by which, in December 1915, the President married Mrs. Norman Galt, formerly Miss Edith Bolling of Wythesville, Virginia, a lady of a fine old Southern stock. Of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, it is enough to say that, through years of great strain, through sudden vicissitudes of success and failure, of sickness and of health, of adulation and abuse, of