Publisher's Synopsis
From the INTRODUCTORY:
The United States of America have passed through two great crises of history-the crisis which gave them birth as an independent nation, and the crisis which decided that they were to remain forever one and indivisible, and that negro slavery was no longer to be tolerated within their bounds. Each of these crises brought to the front a man, not only of lofty spiritual stature, but of the purest order of greatness. George Washington was not, perhaps, what is accounted a man of genius. His powers were solid rather than dazzling. A splenetic Scotch sophist could, without manifest absurdity, sneer at him as merely " a good land surveyor." But he had what the crisis demanded more than brilliancy of genius: he had greatness of character. Never was polity more fortunate than the United States in its founder and patron saint. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was a man of genius if ever there was one; yet what endears his name to his countrymen, and to all lovers of freedom throughout the world, is not his genius but his sheer goodness. The rugged frontiersman, the Illinois country lawyer, was a nobleman in the highest sense of the word. The people of America were much wiser than they realized when they sent that long, lean, ungainly Westerner to the White House. Yet we cannot but believe that some sort of happy instinct guided the democracy in making so brilliant a selection.
In August, 1914, a third great crisis found, as some of us believe, a third great man in the presidential chair of the United States. The issue in this crisis was an entirely new one; not whether the nation should be independent, not whether it should be indivisible, but whether it should attempt to hold aloof from the shaping of the world's future, in fancied inviolability, or should accept the share in that momentous task imposed on it at once by its strength and by its ideals. There was much that was specious, and much that carried the weight of high authority, to be said in favor of the former alternative. The question simply was whether America should realize that the world of to-day was an entirely different world from that in which the tradition of aloofness was established, and that her national ideals of peace and democracy were as formidably menaced by events in Europe as though the Atlantic Ocean had been no broader than the Straits of Dover.
The President in office when that crisis burst upon the world had been elected on wholly different issues. But once more fortune had marvelously favored the United States. He proved to be a man in whom the wisdom of patience was no less conspicuous than the wisdom of courage. So long as it seemed that American ideals might be safeguarded, and the future of the world secured, without the active participation of his country in the vast calamity of war, he held his hand, he disregarded the clamor of impatient spirits on either side of the ocean, and he awaited the time when either the skies should clear, or they should so darken that not even the most ostrich-like optimism could imagine the United States unthreatened by the tornado. Meanwhile the American people had, in a hotly-contested election, reaffirmed its belief that the man they had chosen in calmer times, and in view of simpler problems, was the strong man whose hand was required on the helm of the ship of state.....