Woodrow Wilson

“ He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people; whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. ”

“ And it is as much the law of public opinion as the law of the Constitution that restrains the action of Congress.
It is the habit both of English and American writers to speak of the constitution of Great Britain as if it were ‘writ in water,’ because nothing but the will of Parliament stands between it and revolutionary change. But is there nothing back of the will of Parliament? Parliament dare not go faster than the public thought. There are vast barriers of conservative public opinion to be overrun before a ruinous speed in revolutionary change can be attained. ”

“ In what we read of sovereignty we are led to wonder if it can be the words that confuse us. It must be evident to every one who has not been sophisticated by the terms themselves, or committed beyond retrieval by the controversial use of them, that when, for example, the people of the United States and the Czar of Russia are put together in the same class as sovereigns, language has been forced to a very artificial use, and one term made to cover radically different things. There is clearly a striking contrast between these two sovereigns, in character, in method, and in power. ”

“ Every law is a command, not only, but the command of a supreme authority; and it would be a singular contradiction in terms to speak of this supreme power as limited by law. How can the supreme author of law within a state himself be subject to law: how can the creature bind the creator? How can one refrain from smiling at the logical incapacity of those who speak of limitations to sovereignty, or, more absurdly still, of divisions of sovereignty?65 Is there a hierarchy of supremacies: can there be a co-ordination of creators? ”

“ Closet students of politics are constantly undergoing new drill in the same lesson: the world is an inexorable schoolmaster; it will have none of any thought which does not recognize it. Sometimes theorists like Rousseau, being near enough the truth to deceive even those who know something of it, are so unfortunate as to induce men to rear fabrics of government after their aerial patterns out of earth’s stuffs, with the result of bringing every affair of weight crashing about their ears, to the shaking of the world. ”

“ Having by constitutional grant the last word as to foreign relations, the control of the finances, and even the oversight of executive appointments, Congress exercises what powers of direction and management it pleases, as fulfilling, not as straining, the Constitution. Government lives in the origination, not in the defeat, of measures of government. The President obstructs by means of his ‘No;’ the houses govern by means of their ‘Yes.’ He has killed some policies that are dead; they have given birth to all policies that are alive. ”

“ I do not, of course, deny the power of the people. Ultimately they condition the action of those who govern; and it is salutary that it should be so. It is wise also, if it be not indispensable, that the extent and manner of their control should be explicitly set forth and definitively agreed upon in documents of unmistakable tenor. I say simply that such control is no new thing. It is only the precise formulation of it that is new.
If it seem to be after all a question of words, a little closer scrutiny will disclose the fact that it is much more than that. ”

“ It is common to say, in explanation of our regret that the dawn and youth of democracy’s day are past, that our principles are cooler now and more circumspect, with the coolness and circumspection of advanced years. It seems to some that our enthusiasms have become tamer and more decorous because our sinews have hardened; that as experience has grown idealism has declined. But to speak thus is to speak with the old self-deception as to the character of our politics. ”

“ Taking a prince as a simple and normal organ of government, he analyzes the subjection of princes to their ministers, to priests, to mistresses, to the violent protests of an insubordinate people. No influence that the prince can throw off without losing his own authority, he thinks, can be a sovereign influence; but any influence which can threaten his power if he resists is a sovereign influence, the true depository of supreme political power. Sovereignty thus becomes a catalogue of influences. ”

“ It is thought that, if such coherence of plan, definiteness and continuity of aim, and sanction of party were to be given the work of Congress, the resulting concentration of popular interest and opinion would carry Congress over all the barriers of the Constitution to an undisputed throne of illimitable power. In short, the potential supremacy of Congress is thought to be kept within bounds, not by the constitutional power of the executive and the judiciary, its co-ordinate branches, but by the intrinsic dulness and confusion of its own proceedings. ”

“ But every added element of variety, particularly every added element of foreign variety, complicates even the simpler questions of politics. The dangers attending that variety which is heterogeneity in so vast an organism as ours are, of course, the dangers of disintegration—nothing less; and it is unwise to think these dangers remote and merely contingent because they are not as yet very menacing. We are conscious of oneness as a nation, of vitality, of strength, of progress; but are we often conscious of common thought in the concrete things of national policy? ”

“ The reaches of public opinion have been infinitely extended; the number of voices that must be heeded in legislation and in executive policy has been infinitely multiplied. Modern influences have inclined every man to clear his throat for a word in the world’s debates. They have popularized everything they have touched.
In the newspapers, it is true, there is very little concert between the writers; little but piecemeal opinion is created by their comment and argument; there is no common voice amidst their counsellings. ”

“ Sovereigns have always been subject in greater or less degree to the community; have always been organs of the State; have never been the State itself. But they have been sovereigns none the less; they, and not the community over which they presided.
It is necessary, if there is to be any clear thinking at all upon this subject, to distinguish very sharply two radically different things; namely, the powers and processes of governing, on the one hand, from the relations of the people to those powers and processes, on the other. Those relations are relations of assent and obedience ”

“ The government which we founded one hundred years ago was no type of an experiment in advanced democracy, as we allowed Europe and even ourselves to suppose; it was simply an adaptation of English constitutional government. If we suffered Europe to study our institutions as instances in point touching experimentation in politics, she was the more deceived. If we began the first century of our national existence under a similar impression ourselves, there is the greater reason why we should start out upon a new century of national life with more accurate conceptions. ”

“ So long as it continues to be governed by unrelated standing committees, and to take its resolves in accordance with no clear plan, no single, definite purpose, so long as what it does continues to be neither evident nor interesting, so long must all its exertions of power be invidious; so long must its competition with the executive or the judiciary seem merely jealous and always underhand: so long must it remain virtually impossible to control it through public opinion. ”

“ Nothing could give surer promise of popular power than the activity and alertness of thought which are made through such agencies to accompany the training of the public schools. The activity may often be misdirected or unwholesome, may sometimes be only feverish and mischievous, a grievous product of narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it is none the less a stirring and potent activity. It at least marks the initial stages of effective thought. It makes men conscious of the existence and interest of affairs lying outside the dull round of their own daily lives. ”

“ Bright on one occasion in the House of Commons, “that this debate will yield about thirty hours of talk, and will end in no result. I have observed that all great questions in this country require thirty hours of talk many times repeated before they are settled. There is much shower and much sunshine between the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the harvest, but the harvest is generally reaped after all.” So it must be in all self-governing nations of to-day. They are not a single audience within sound of an orator’s voice, but a thousand audiences. ”

“ What is the valuable element in monarchy which causes men constantly to turn to it as to an ideal form of government, could it but be kept pure and wise? It is its cohesion, its readiness and power to act, its abounding loyalty to certain concrete things, to certain visible persons, its concerted organization, its perfect model of progressive order. Democracy abounds with vitality ”

“ It is this power of teaching other men how to think that has given to the works of Adam Smith an immortality of influence. In his first university chair, the chair of Logic, he had given scant time to the investigation of the formal laws of reasoning, and had insisted, by preference, upon the practical uses of discourse, as the living application of logic, treating of style and of the arts of persuasion and exposition; and here in his other chair, of Moral Philosophy, he was practically illustrating the vivifying power of the art he had formerly sought to expound to his pupils. ”

“ Why has no one ever written on the art of academic lecturing and its many notable triumphs? In some quarters new educational canons have spoken an emphatic condemnation of the college lecture, and it would seem to be high time to consider its value, as illustrative of an art about to be lost, if not as exemplary of forces to be retained, even if modified. Are not our college class-rooms, in being robbed of the old-time lecture, and getting instead a science-brief of data and bibliography, being deprived also of that literary atmosphere which once pervaded them? ”

“ When we look back to the moderate sagacity and steadfast, self-contained habit in self-government of the men to whom we owe the establishment of our institutions in the United States, we are at once made aware that there is no communion between their democracy and the radical thought and restless spirit called by that name in Europe. ”

“ But the public opinion of Great Britain is no more a juggler of precedents than is the public opinion of this country. Perhaps the absence of a written constitution makes it even less a fancier of logical refinements. The arrangements of the British constitution have, for all their theoretical instability, a very firm and definite standing in the political habit of Englishmen: and the greatest of those arrangements can be done away with only by the extraordinary force of conscious revolution. ”