May 2, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
1.7 
President Wilson's War Mind : By L. P. Jacks 
To understand the war-mind of President Wilson, 
and to leam the lesson it conveys, we must read 
his speeches from the beginning of the war as 
though they formed a continuous whole. Those 
who have not the full text of the speeches before 
them will find a good substitute in The Foreign Policy of 
Woodrow Wilson, by Messrs Robinson and West (Macmillan), 
in which the relevant passages are presented in historical 
order. Reading them continuously, they present us with a 
natural, inevitable, and yet very remarkable evolution. I find 
nothing inconsistent between the earher and the later sa^nngs 
of the President, notwithstanding that the former are devoted 
to the advocacy of peace and the latter to the advocacy of 
war. On the contrary, the later passages throw back a 
meaning on to the earlier, which makes them doubly signi- 
ficant, while the earlier are 
like the clear hours of the 
morning in which the 
weatherwise may read the 
portent of a coming storm. 
It has been said that 
whosoever writes the his- 
tory of the war must 
write it as a drama ; and 
certainly there has been 
no more dramatic feature 
in the whole tragic story 
than that presented by 
the movement of Mr. 
Wilson's mind from 
position to position in 
correspondence with the 
gradual . unfolding of the 
plot. In reading through 
these speeches one has the 
feeUng famiUar to every 
lover of the Odyssey. 
There is the same gradual 
darkening of the atmo- 
sphere as events march on 
to the final catastrophe, 
the same tightening of 
expectancy and tension as 
the gathering storm comes 
nearer, until at last, when 
the gloom is deepest, the 
lightning leaps out and 
retribution falls on the 
wrong-doer. If the words 
are not inadequate to 
matter of such moment, 
'one may say of the 
speeches that they have 
the wholeness of a work 
of art. The germinating 
idea of Mr. Wilson's policy 
is that America, because of her greatness, of her power, 
of her vast potentialities, is a servant among the nations, 
and not a master It is a noble conception, and peculiarly 
fitted to inspire a young and mighty people with a vision 
of its destiny, and so to mark out for it in the centuries 
that are to come a line of development different from 
and I think higher than, any which the older States of the 
world have so far pursued. Though the idea of greatness in 
service has been long familiar in other connections, where 
perhaps it has received more lip-service than loyalty, President 
Wilson is the first statesman to make it operative, or to 
endeavour to make it operative, as a guiding principle of 
international politics ; and this alone, whether he succeeds 
or not, assures him a distinct place in history and in the 
grateful remembrance of mankind. Needless to say, this 
idea — that the greatest nation must needs be a servant- 
nation — stands out as the polar opposite to the notion of 
national greatness which prevails with the rulers and appar- 
ently with the people of Germany ; and a prescient mind, 
on hearing it first announced by Mr. Wilson in the early 
stages of the war, might have predicted that a moment 
would come when the two opposites, driven by a dramatic 
or moral necessity, would break out into open conflict with 
one another. 
From the very first, the question uppermost in the Presi- 
dent's mind has been this : In what way, by what policy, 
by what action can America best serve the nations involved 
Bust of the President: By Jo Davidson 
(Now on view at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street. 
This buit was executed by Mr. Davidson at the White House just before America 
entered the war. It is the only bust for which the President has given sittings. 
in the struggle, and through them mankind at large ? Again 
and again his public utterances have repeated this, thereby 
showing its solemn insistence in his pHvate mind • and though 
he has varied his answer with the change of circumstance, he 
has never departed from the purpose and spirit of the ques- 
tion. Indeed, he did not wait for the war to disclose his 
guiding idea. 
On March 5th, 1914, he said, in a message to Congress 
when the Panama tolls were under discussion : "We are too 
big, too powerful, too self-respecting a nation to interpret 
with too strained or refined a reading the words of our own 
promises just because we have power enough to give us 
leave to read them as we please" — a sentence which, in its 
latter clause, anticipates the most hateful aspect of German 
pohcy both in the initiarion and the conduct of the war, 
and is almost a prediction 
of the coming conflict. 
Again, on April 30th, 1915, 
he said to the members of 
the Associated Press : " We 
do not want anything that 
does not belong to us. 
Is not a nation in that 
position free to serve other 
nations ? " And three days 
after the Lusitania had 
been sunk he followed 
with the statement, so 
much misunderstood at 
the time: " I am interested 
in neutrality because there 
is something so much 
greater to do than to fight. 
There is a distinction wait- 
ing for this nation which 
no nation has ever yet 
had." A year later he 
sounded the same note. 
On April 19th, 1916, he 
said: "We cannot forget 
that we are the responsible 
spokesmen of the rights 
of humanity." What this 
last involved comes out 
very clearly in the Address 
to Congress on the occasion 
of America's entry into 
the war. "We shall fight 
for the ' things we have 
always carried nearest our 
hearts — for democracy, for 
the right of those who 
submit to authority to 
have a voice in their 
own government, for the 
rights and liberties of 
small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such 
a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and Safety to 
all nations, and make the world itself free," 
If the reader will take these speeches as a connected whole, • 
or even the few sentences I have quoted, he will have before 
him the Odyssey of the President's mind. They indicate the 
successive stages through which he passed in his efforts to 
find an answer to the question : How can the United States, 
in the world crisis that has now arisen, most effectually serve 
mankind? In the earher stages "neutrality" covered the 
answer that then seeme4 most fitting. By remaining neutral 
the President beheved that the United States could render 
most help not only in hastening the advent of peace, but in 
giving to peace, whenever it should come, the form most 
conducive to the just interests of all concerned. He believed 
— and rightly believed — that impartiality would confer 
upon America rights and powers as a peacemaker both 
during the conflict and afterwards ; and he saw, further, 
that a peace-making nation was the world's greatest need at 
the time. Then, through no will of his own, but by the 
direct action of Germany, the right to be neutral, the power 
to be impartial, was taken from him. The consequence was 
that the first form of his answer was necessarily abandoned 
as no longer apphcable to the circumstances, and another had 
to be sought. Only one was possible. If America was to 
serve all nations she must make war on the Power which 
was striving to make all nations serve itself. Thus, by what 
