WILSON AIMED TO BUILD FOUNDATION

Professor Young was associated with President Wilson as Economic Adviser at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and was a member of several of the Commissions which were charged with the work of drafting the Treaty.

This is not the time to attempt an appraisal of Woodrow Wilson's work or to guess at the place he will occupy in history. The real significance of his work will be determined, not by our estimates of it, but by what the nation and the world build upon it.

He was like no other man who has ever become an important figure in American public life. His qualities, his methods, and his whole career were such as to make comparisons and parallels misleading. He was born of southern Scotch-Irish stock. He was a graduate of Princeton and later a student of law at the University of Virginia and of history and political science at the Johns Hopkins University. He became a professor of history and government, first at Bryn Mawr, then at Wesleyan, and then at Princeton. He was made President of Princeton in 1902, Governor of New Jersey in 1911, President of the United States in 1913, and again in 1917.

Sought Living Realities

Never was there a scholar who was less of a pedant, or a statesman who was more impatient with empty forms and artificial contrivances and more anxious to lay hold of living realities. The League of Nations was to him not so much an international covenant as a process of international co-operation. His unyielding stand against modifying or attaching reservations to the covenant of the League was based, we may reasonably suppose, upon his conviction that the avowed enemies of some of the clauses of the covenant were really seeking to find a way to attack the life of the League itself.

Aimed at Moral Leadership

The living reality of political institutions he found in the hearts and minds of men. "Until a people thinks its government national," he wrote forty-five years ago, "it is not national." In the same way, he might have said later, there is nothing high in the purposes of any war, except in so far as the purposes of the men who are shaping its course and who are waging it are high. And so again, until people think a peaceful world is possible, there will be no lasting peace. The task of the statesman, then, is one of moral leadership. He can build a better State only in so far as be can change the attitude and purposes of men.

Such was the creed that made of Woodrow Wilson's public career a consistent whole. Such is the test which he would have had us apply to the success or failure of that career.