weighing and analyzing the most current idioms and often making in them
some thoughtful alteration the better to express his exact meaning. His
literary training appears to have been almost wholly English. There are
few traces in his writings of any classical reading or of any first-hand
acquaintance with French, German, or Italian authors. And indeed in the
substance of his thought I wonder if he is sufficiently hospitable to
foreign ideas, especially to the vast body of comment on the French
Revolution. I imagine few Continental authorities would agree with him
in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of that great
movement, which he seems to regard with almost unmitigated disapproval.

In Mr. Wilson's addresses and public letters concerning the War he
re-affirms his principles and applies them with high confidence to the
fateful problems of this time. His tone has become vastly deeper and
sounder since he made his great decision, and from his Speech to
Congress, on February 3, 1917, to his recent Baltimore appeal, it has
rung true to every good impulse in the hearts of our people. His letter
to the Pope is in every way his master-piece, in style, in temper, and
in power of thought. He has led his country to the place it ought to
occupy, by the side of that other English democracy whose institutions,
ideals, and destiny are almost identical with our own, as he has
demonstrated in the writings of half a lifetime. Let us hope there was
prophetic virtue in a passage of his _Constitutional Government_, where,
speaking of the relation between our several States and the Union that
binds them together, he says they "may yet afford the world itself the
model of federation and liberty it may in God's providence come to
seek."

No one can rise from a perusal of the great mass of Mr. Wilson's
writings without an almost oppressive sense of his unremitting and