treme as to interfere with the public welfare." You certainly cannot believe that free trade or any other laissez-faire principles run riot in our present tariff laws. Now that you have declared yourself a protectionist, however, we will not ask you to act as if you had never ceased to be a free-trader. We should like you to study the life of Sir Robert Peel. But we will be content for the present if you will merely insist that Congress shall squeeze the sheer robbery out of the schedules, although the real protection remains. All you have said since Election Day indicates that this is your purpose. . . .

Frankly, again, we could wish there had been, in your campaigns for the nomination of your party and then for election, less apparent dependence on the help and favor of your predecessor. It gave, alike to your rivalry with other leaders in your own party and to your contest with the candidate of the opposition, a character not unexampled in our history. That Van Buren was similarly championed has not been to his credit with historians. But we Americans understand personal loyalties, and respect them, too, when they do not mean disloyalty to principle or to us. Let us feel that in office you held yourself responsible only to us and to principle, and we will not malignantly keep you in mind of the manner of your elevation.

...

We are glad you have been a judge. Granting you consecration instead of ambition, we think you will find that to do justice among men will be your most constant function, though you wear no ermine. Our hope is the greater because you have propounded no theory of life, profess no allegiance to any one principle in your own life, but have merely risen from task to task by virtue of efficiency and good nature. You will not set obiter dicta above decisions. The case itself will be your business, and you will wait for cases to come up before you decide them.

In nothing will that habit and procedure serve you better than in your effort, following your predecessor's lead, to make government stand for right as between man and man, class and class, force and force, in all its relations to our appallingly complex industrial system. To proceed from one specific evil to another, to formulate no rules not based on actual experience, to try no mere experiments—to go on step by step-this, simple as it seems, is the sole secret of England's success in free government. She arrives at generalizations only by amassing precedents. Her genius is the distrust of genius, and her caution and foresight consist in keeping pace with the demands of her civilization, not in running ahead to meet them. . . .

Your limitations, therefore, commend you, Mr. President. Our greeting is the more cordial because we do not take you, and you do not take yourself, for a man of destiny; because we are not moved to make our salutation an obeisance.

Nevertheless, we commend to you all the inspiration to be got from considering the magnitude of your trust, the terrible height to which you are lifted up by our will and choice. Your station is like Cæsar's, or Charlemagne's. It is not less because railroad and steamship, electricity and the press, bring far things near and make the mysterious commonplace. Because you hold it,

Europe and Asia are daily mindful of you. Maintain it, then, as we have no doubt you will, with dignity, and be conscious always that the great mass of your countrymen, of all races and parties and creeds, know instinctively the line between that criticism and opposition which a republic permits and that which patriotism sternly forbids.

Good morning, Mr. President-and good luck!

TO WOODROW WILSON

(From Harper's Weekly of March 8, 1913)

Good morning, Mr. President!

To you, indeed, it hardly seems needful that this journal should offer assurances of its own good will and good wishes. In all its life no political enterprise has ever engaged its sympathies more deeply than that which ends today as you take your solemn oath of office. But to you, too, we can offer whatever heartening there may be in our conviction that you also have the good will and the good wishes of the majority of Americans.

We have no fear, Mr. President, that you will overestimate the value of our own or any other assurances in that matter; even if you agree with them, you will not vainly imagine that your present great prestige and popularity are a secure possession. For we feel sure that you are not politically short-sighted. We feel sure that you do not need to be told that the more suspiciously a man enters upon a great trial of his quality the more he has to fear from anything like failure to meet it worthily. You have shown convincingly that you understand the incessant nature of Democracy's demands and the necessity of meeting them continuously, unfalteringly-of fighting all one's battles through, as Grant said-if one would survive politically.

In that clear-eyed envisagement of obligations and of dangers we find, indeed, one of the chief sources of our hope in your administration; for we regard it as one of the many proofs of your political competency.

On this point, no doubt, we differ with many other observers of your career. For we do not in the least share the apprehension that your long years of devotion to academic tasks will be found to have dimmed your eyes to harsh realities. On the contrary, we take comfort from the circumstance that you have all your life been studying in quiet such problems as now confront you, such careers as you yourself are now attempting. We are happy to feel that, like most Americans, but unlike your immediate predecessor, you like politics; that you understand politics; that you have already proved yourself an excellent politician. We shall be disappointed if, before the end, you shall not have proved yourself a great politician.

So shall we all be, Mr. President, and so will you be; for none of us has indi

cated a clearer comprehension than you have indicated of what the times and the country's mood really demand of you. Administrative skill, executive efficiency-these, of course, are always demanded of a President. But you know that today, for you, they will not be enough. You know that you face a crisis; that you may, quite conceivably, inaugurate an epoch. Before we take up, with other journals, our constant duty of unsparing criticism, perhaps you will permit us briefly to indicate what we conceive your full task and opportunity to be.

It is to lead Democracy in a great advance which it now clamors for. It is to guide Democracy wisely while it compasses and overcomes a new kind of opposition that for some generations has been erecting itself among us; a kind of opposition to Democracy which is all the more baffling and confounding because it is, in the main, an outcome of Democracy itself; because it is as if, in our startled battling with it, a giant strove with his own giant offspring. In this respect the curious instinct of the cartoonists is no false leading, but a true indication of our real predicament. For the real foe of Democracy in this country wears no form that privilege has ever worn before. It is not monarchical, it is not aristocratic, it is not military, it is not clerical. It is entirely economic and industrial. The seat and source of it is neither court nor camp nor church; it is the common market-place. The essence of it is, to be sure, monopoly, and monopoly is old. But this kind of monopoly, self-created and selfsustaining monopoly, is new. It is young and vigorous. Of all the forces that make against Democracy it is the youngest and most vigorous now extant in the world.

That is your giant antagonist, Mr. President; and Democracy expects of you nothing less than that you forthwith prove yourself its Jack the Giant Killer...

We do not neglect to note your handicaps; we shall not forget them when we fall back into our ordinary function of watchfulness and criticism. It was your immediate predecessor's misfortune to lead a party which had been too long in power; it is your misfortune that you lead a party which has been too long out of power. It lacks the training power alone can give. It has the habit of irresponsible protest and criticism, not of responsible action. You will be surrounded by men who can speak only from conviction, not from experience. To keep your leadership, you must be, perhaps, complacent with ignorance and prejudice.

Do not, we beseech you, be too complacent; for that may prove your greatest danger. We do not underestimate the necessity of tact and consideration and whatever else may make for harmony, but we would, nevertheless, fortify you in loyalty to your own superior training and instincts. For it must be with you as with every other man lifted up to high place and great power. There is no way to spare you the duty of self-reliance; there is no way to spare you the loneliness of your great station. . . .

Your party is also hungry, for it comes in from a long wandering in the desert, and from this cause, too, you will face temptation and must endure a

wearying importunity. More than that: because your party is unaccustomed to power, it will not be at ease in power. Part of your great task in leadership will be to teach it self-confidence; yet it will be equally necessary to hold it back from over-confidence and extravagance. There will inevitably be required of you a constant and supremely difficult balancing of restraint and energy, of sympathy and steadfastness, of courage and caution. For the full test of you and your party will be nothing less than this: that through you Democracy shall win victories and yet shall not abuse them.

But if, Mr. President, we are thus candidly mindful of all that confronts you, we are also happily mindful of much, of very much, to hearten and to help you. Happily for you, as for us all, you are the choice of no one section, but of the whole country. As your elevation excludes no one section from power, you will escape a kind of bitterness that has borne hard on many of your predecessors; and yet you will not lack the fine inspiration to be drawn from the peculiar pride in you of a particular section, a section strong in loyalties. Southernborn, it is your privilege to restore the South to a full share in the country's affairs, to help her prove her fitness for it and to revive, let us hope forever, the great tradition of her spacious patriotism in the early days of the Republic.

Less than this, perhaps, but far from little, will be the inspiration of your academic memories. At every crisis there will be the inspiring consciousness that to an extraordinary degree you represent in American public life the training and ideals of American colleges. There will be something still more poignant-the passionate, intimate appeal of your own ancient university, calling upon you, as with bells and songs, to win for her still greater honors. If need be, Alma Mater may serve you better still. If the worst comes to the worst, if the path of duty becomes the way of sacrifice, if it so happens that you must lay down even popularity itself on the altar of patriotism, you can still see the tall tower with which she commemorates that other President of whom, in the hour of his seeming failure, you yourself wrote:

"The men who assess his fame in the future will be no partisans, but men who love candor, courage, honesty, strength, unshaken capacity, and high purpose such as his."

Yes, Mr. President, the task is great, the dangers manifold, and manifold the temptations. But all your youth will now, surely, rise up and reinforce your manhood. The great thing has happened-has happened to you, of all men. Surely you will not quail before it. Surely you will not lack in the face of opportunity and of danger the supreme human quality; you will not lack courage-the kind of courage that is one with sincerity. As you go to meet Fate's call, the time's demand, your country's summons, your mood will not be one of pride or self-sufficiency; yet surely it will be as if, in your own heart, a drum beat, or a trumpet sounded.

Good morning, Mr. President-and good fortune!

TO CALVIN COOLIDGE

Good morning, Mr. President!

We rejoice to greet you, at the beginning of this memorable day in your remarkable career, with faith already justified by your own good works.

When, under an inscrutable Providence, you were summoned to replace a leader snatched away overnight, you found yourself in the difficult position of a substitute whose services the people had not expected to require. You were quite naturally divided between a sense of obligation to fulfil the plans of your predecessor and your own individual convictions which, under such circumstances, more than ever demanded free play. Moreover, you were called upon to head a party, divided and jangling with many angry, discordant voices, and were confronted immediately by the imperative need of reforming partisan lines and of reducing them to some semblance of order if the task imposed upon you were to go forward to appreciable performance. So between your obligation to the dead, your duty to yourself, and the chaotic state of your party, you were compelled to exercise the utmost tact and discretion; and you did so admirably, with results which have left little to be desired.

But, after all, you were only Vice-President-Acting-President and could not be expected to assert your rule so vigorously as when, after a test of your qualities, the people should have confirmed your leadership. Manfully the test was met and happily was withstood. Now you need only be yourself.

You understand this as few others before you have realized it. You are not a novice in politics who must be reminded that public office is a public trust, in which the character of the individual is inseparably merged with that of the official. You have had wide experience in government, wider and more thorough than any of your predecessors in modern times. Still it has had its limitations. Until you were elected Vice President, you had been concerned all your life solely with the problems of a single Commonwealth which, important though they were, denied you the