kind. Personally, it will be a matter of indifference to me what the verdict on the 7th of November is, provided I have any degree of confidence that when a later jury sits, I shall get their judgment in my favor, not in my favor personally -what difference does that make?-but in my favor as an honest and conscientious spokesman of a great nation."

CHAPTER XXIII

THE MAN IN ACTION

Woodrow Wilson, the man in action, is intensely human. He loves the simple life and his habits are those of the plain men of the country. He hates the silk hat and the conventional dress, and he is happiest, it is said, in his working clothes. It was this preference for the unconventional, for simplicity and directness, that led him to dispense with the inaugural ball, and to upset the precedents of a century by going to Congress to deliver his first message. And he disarmed those who thought this act savored of royalty by introducing himself as "a human being."

He does not give much consideration to the way his acts will be seen through the eyes of others. Disliking form and ceremonies and preferring the simple life, he declined, without even thinking of it, an election to the Chevy Chase Country Club, and was amazed next day to find that he had committed a mortal sin against high society.

The ceremonies that surrounded him in the White House amused him. "For example," he

said, "take matters of this sort: I will not say whether it is wise or unwise, simple or grave, but certain precedents have been established that in certain companies the President must leave the room first, and the people must give way to him. They must not sit down if he is standing up. It is a very uncomfortable thing to have to think of all the other people every time I get up and sit down, and all that sort of thing, so that when I get guests in my own house and the public is shut out, I adjourn being President and take leave to be a gentleman. If they draw back and insist upon my doing something first, I firmly decline.”

Moreover, he protested with a show of humor against enforced presidential conventionalties that kept him virtually a prisoner in the White House, and he ridiculed the customs that placed him in the "same category as the National Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, or the Washington Monument."

"If I only knew an exhibition appearance to assume," he said once, speaking humorously of this custom, "I would like to have it pointed out, so that I could practice it before the looking glass and see if I could not look like the Monu

ment. Being regarded as a national exhibit, it will be much simpler than being shaken hands with by the whole United States."

He did not exaggerate the Washington habit when he declared that if he "turned up anywhere" in Washington he was "personally conducted to beat the band" by "the Curator, the Assistant Curator and every other blooming official, and they show so much attention that I don't see the building."

In speaking of the Presidency, he said:

"I feel like a person appointed for a certain length of time to administer that office, and I feel just as much outside of it at this moment as I did before I was elected to it. I feel just as much outside of it as I still feel outside of the government of the United States. No man could imagine himself the government of the United States; but he could understand that some part of his fellow citizens had told him to go and run a certain part of it the best he knew how. That would not make him the government itself or the thing itself. It would just make him responsible for running it the best he knew how. The machine is so much greater than himself,

the office is so much greater than himself, the office is so much greater than he can ever be, and the most he can do is to look grave enough and self-possessed enough to seem to fill it.

"I can hardly refrain every now and then from tipping the public a wink as much as to say, 'It is only "me" that is inside this thing. I know perfectly well that I will have to get out presently. I know then that I will look just my own proper size, and that for the time being the proportions are somewhat refracted and misrepresented to the eye because of the large thing I am inside of, from which I am tipping you this wink.'''

Himself a human being, he has been in sympathetic touch with the sentiments of the American people. He is the real leader of a great democracy because he feels in his own heart the needs and desires and demands of the American people. He has sought to make their spirit his spirit, and their conscience his conscience.

"I am diligently trying," he said, "to collect all the brains that are borrowable in order that I will not make more blunders than it is inevitable a man should make who has great limitations of knowledge and capacity."