tion of grave abuses and to establish the rights of the people in such impregnable form that they may be able to resist more effectively in the future the aggressions and abuses of privilege." The relationship between McAdoo and Wilson, from its inception a friendship of remarkable quality based upon the desire of both men to promote the general welfare by the establishment of certain fundamental principles of democracy, was intensified by the Secretary's marriage in May, 1914, to the President's youngest daughter, Eleanor Randolph Wilson. Out of an over-sensitive regard for the proprieties, McAdoo offered, when he became engaged to Miss Wilson, his resignation from office, an offer immediately refused by the President who, in spite of his own tendency to bend backward where any relationships, family or merely friendly, in any way touched his public office, wisely decided that the country could not spare McAdoo's service in the Treasury because of any involving of family connections with himself. The marriage, taking place a little while before the outbreak of the European War, brought the two men into an association which has few if any parallels in public life. In the outside world, particularly in that world immediately outside, the presumption sprang into being that Wilson and McAdoo merged their interests as one. The President's son-in-law was supposed to be the President's adviser on all state secrets. Jackson's long-famed Kitchen Cabinet became innocuous in comparison with the Washington inference of Wilson's Library Cabinet, composed of McAdoo and himself. As a matter of fact-fact borne out by extraneous evidence as well as by McAdoo's own statement-both men sedulously refrained from discussion of any topic which could conceivably be construed as affecting the work of any department in the Cabinet but the Treasury; and Treasury discussions were far rarer than would have seemed likely to the railbirds of the capital. McAdoo's detailed and graphic letters to the President, written in a time when correspondence between two men of the same family would have seemed superfluous, support his statement that he took up state affairs with Wilson only through the ordinary channels of communication. Out of a fear that their relationship might be considered as giving the Secretary of the Treasury an advantage over his fellow-officers in the Cabinet, both men refrained from what had been the ordinary intercourse of their earlier friendship. In some ways this was a disadvantage for the nation, in others a genuine advantage. Wilson and McAdoo made their decisions independently, correlating them only in their official capacities. Their reserve did not break the spiritual sympathy between the two men who were to share the nation's burdens in one of its most portentous crises. In the silence of sentries, as the clouds in eastern Europe grew darker, the President and the Secretary of the Treasury took their watching posts. Even if they could not foresee the breadth of the war which was to engulf the United States in its maelstrom, they went on guard in those first hours of danger for the land they had sworn to protect. The serious illness of the President's wife-Mrs. Wilson died two days after England went to war with Germany-constituted, however, between the two silent men a new bond in friendship. The long hours through which they waited for that ray of hope which never came forged ties of understanding between them which was to bear fruit for a stricken world. Through watches of personal emotion their kinship was welded into an instrument of general good. Sentries, wakeful over tragedy of their own, they saw the fires of war leap from the far horizons. On the twenty-ninth of July Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; the British fleet began to concentrate, Belgium proceeded to mobilize, Germany called in her High Sea fleet, Russia rushed her troops to the southern borders of her Empire, and France waited the bugle to the tri-color. While the clouds of war threatened destruction upon a world that had deluded itself with thought of universal peace, two men who were in time to end the great conflict and rescue Occidental civilization from the chaos of slaughter sat in a library in the White House, overlooking the dark line of the Virginia hills, and planned through the night to keep their country from the scourge of war. Not till the dawn came out of the Maryland fields did Woodrow Wilson and William Gibbs McAdoo give up their vigil; but with the dawn had come the four horsemen. |