support to Governor Wilson, who made slow but steady gains until his final triumph. On the first ballot he received three hundred and twenty-four votes, and on the forty-sixth, which nominated, nine hundred and ninety.
Upon accepting the nomination for the presidency, Mr. Wilson thus succinctly summarized in his speech at Sea Girt the two great things he would undertake to do:
“There are two great things to do. One is to set up the rule of justice and of right in such matters as the tariff, the regulation of the trusts and the prevention of monopoly, the adaptation of our banking and currency laws to the varied uses to which our people must put them, the treatment of those who do the daily labor in our factories and mines and throughout all our great industrial and commercial undertakings, and the political life of the people of the Philippines, for whom we hold governmental power in trust for their service, not our own. The other, the additional duty, is the great task of protecting our people and our resources and of keeping open to the whole people the doors of opportunity through which they must, generation by generation, pass if they are to make conquest of their fortunes in health, in freedom, in peace and in contentment. In the performance of this second great duty we are face to face with questions of conservation and of development, questions of forests and water powers and mines and waterways, of the building of an adequate merchant marine, and the opening of every highway and facility and the setting up of every safeguard needed by a great, industrious, expanding nation.”
In this speech Governor Wilson contended that representative government is nothing more nor less than an effort to give voice to the great, struggling body of the masses — the learned and the fortunate, as well as the uneducated — through spokesmen chosen out of every grade and class. He declared it to be a fact which it would be dangerous to ignore that, “We stand in the presence of an awakened nation — awake to the knowledge that she has lost certain cherished liberties and has wasted priceless resources which she had solemnly under taken to hold in trust for posterity and for all mankind; and she stands confronted with an occasion for constructive statesmanship such as has not arisen since the days in which the Government was set up.” . . . “We are servants of the people, the whole people. The Nation has been unnecessarily, unreasonably at war within itself. Interest has clashed with interest when there were common principles of right and of fair dealing which might and should have bound them all together, not as rivals, but as partners. As the servants of all, we are bound to undertake the great duty of accommodation and adjustment.”
The Nominee was outspoken in his conviction that the tariff should be revised. Said he:
“Tariff duties, as they have employed them, have not been a means of setting up an equitable system of protection. They have been, on the contrary, a method of fostering special privilege. They have made it easy to establish monopoly in our domestic markets. Trusts have owed their origin and their secure power to them. The economic freedom of our people, our prosperity in trade, our untrammeled energy in manufacture depend upon their reconsideration from top to bottom in an entirely different spirit. . . . It is obvious that the changes we make should be made only at such a rate and in such a way as will least interfere with the normal and healthful course of commerce and manufacture. But we shall not on that account act with timidity, as if we did not know our own minds, for we are certain of our ground and of our object. There should be an immediate revision, and it should be downward, unhesitatingly and steadily downward.” . . .
President Wilson made an inspiring campaign, delivering a number of speeches at strategic centers in the various states. The triangular character of the race made it the most interesting in American history since Lincoln's time. Wilson got 6,293,454 of the popular vote; Roosevelt 4,119,538, and Taft 3,484,980, but the New Jersey Executive got an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College, the vote standing thus: Wilson 435, Roosevelt 88, and Taft 8.
The marrow of the man is his sincerity. His carrying out of every pledge made in New Jersey presaged his course as President. He kept the rudder true in his State in a storm that beat its fury upon the Commonwealth and threatened to divide and defeat his party, victorious for the first time in a dozen years. In his inaugural address, in which his sincere and genuine appeal to “all forward-looking men” fell upon ears that were glad to hear the pledge of the New Freedom he had come to inaugurate in our Republic, the new President showed that his campaign pledges were the sacred covenants between the new executive and the people.
His inaugural illustrated the truth that he was sailing by the chart which he himself had prepared in the campaign: After insisting that the change of government meant that the nation now sought to use the Democratic party to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view; after asserting that some old, familiar things have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister, and that some new things have come to assume the aspect of things long believed in and familiar, he declared we had come to a work of restoration, and continued:
“We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs; water-courses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.”
The inaugural address concluded with this appeal for co-operation in the great task upon which he was entering:
“This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”
When the 63rd Congress was called in extraordinary session the President's proclamation did not limit the purpose to tariff reduction, as many party leaders desired, but it was primarily convened to revise and reduce the tariff. The previous Republican administration had revised but not reduced, and suffered a crushing defeat in the elections of 1910 and 1912. Wilson, moreover, had before his vision the mistakes of the late President Cleveland to aid him in determining to permit no new question or no reasonings to divert him from the paramount duty of responding to the double mandate of the voters to reduce the tariff and unfetter trade. His every utterance emphasized tariff as the first great reform to be carried out. He was in frequent conference with the leaders of the House, both before Congress assembled and when it convened. He led in the Nation in making and invoking public sentiment as he had successfully led when he was Governor of New Jersey. To emphasize his tariff program and impress the argument for genuine reduction, he astonished the country by going in person and reading his message to Congress, reviving an early custom which went into innocuous desuetude because Jefferson, who had no taste and little gift for public speaking, sent his message to be read by a clerk, instead of delivering it in person. There were those who declared this return to an old order suggested a king giving orders to Congress. They predicted that the innovation smacked of a return to Federalism. But on the day that Wilson entered the House to read his message every seat was occupied. Hundreds could not gain admission. Those who witnessed the
