Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck
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28 September, 1913.
It was a great comfort to get Allen’s telegram yesterday. I had grown very anxious and uneasy at not hearing in so many weeks; for when you last wrote it was evident that you were by no means so well out of your alarming attack as you wished me to believe. Maybe Allen will drop me a note to give a few reassuring particulars. Friends do not multiply as life lengthens; they grow fewer, ratcher, those whom one has had time to test and can tie to, and one feels his dependence upon them grow greater and greater almost week by week.
The struggle goes on down here without intermission. Why it should be a struggle it is hard (cynicism put on one side) to say. Why should public men, senators of the United States, have to be led and stimulated to what all the country knows to be their duty! Why should they see less clearly, apparently, than anyone else what the straight path of service is! To whom are they listening? Certainly not to the voice of the people, when they quible and twist and hesitate. They have strangely blunted perceptions, and exaggerate themselves in the most extraordinary degree. Therefore it is a struggle and must be accepted as such. A man of my temperament and my limitations will certainly wear himself out in it; but that is small matter: the danger is that he may be lose his patience and suffer the weakness of exasperation. It is against these that I have constantly to guard myself. How does the game look to you, and the actors in it, as you sit at a distance and look on at it? It is more important to me to know how it looks outside of Washington than how it looks inside. The men who think in Washington only cannot think for the country. It is a place of illusions. The disease is that men think of themselves and not of their tasks of service, and are more concerned what will happen to them than what will happen to the country. I am not complaining or scolding or holding myself superior; I am only analyzing, as a man will on Sunday, when the work pauses and he looks before and after. My eye is no better than theirs; it is only fresher, and was a thoughtful spectator of these very thsings before it got on the inside and tried to see straight there.
Perhaps you saw in the newspapers that I went up to Princeton the other day to vote at the primaries. To walk about the dear old place after these years in which my thought has of necessity been separated from it and after six months of actual physical absence from it was like revisiting my old self; and the experience was both sweet and bitter. As ill luck would have it, I saw both West and Hibben. I was not obliged to speak to West, but I met Hibben face to face and had to force myself to behave as I knew I should, not cordially (that was spiritually impossible) but politely. Those who looked on and understood, like Stockton Axson, say I did pretty well; but I suspect it was a rather shabby exhibition of manners struggling through feeling and infinite embarrassment. Do you remember how we used to sit on the shore in Bermuda and talk of West, in the days when he was showing himself so complete and able a Machiavelli and when my name was first being mentioned in connection with my present office? Do you think now that there were any elements of prophecy in those talks, so full of speculation and anxiety and of all that then perturbed me. Your contribution to those conversations was a serene, unreasonable faith in me, for which I blessed your heart with all the feeling that was in me but did not in the same measure admire your judgment or knowledge of the world. It would be impossible to say (would it not?) how much of a many-circumstanced man’s success is made up, so far as its spiritual stupff is concerned, of the faith his loving friends have in him. It seems to make a standard for him to live up to, to interpret something ideal to him and oblige him to strive after it. In brief, it makes him just that much better than himself; transfers and translates into him what is sweetest and most ideal in those who so trust him. To make a man who has the struggle of life to face feel the things you expect of him as a sort of compulsion on his spirit, a mandate in all his conduct, is to lifet him where he could never climb by himself. And was ever man more blessed by such helping friends than I!
Your devoted friend,
Woodrow Wilson
Love and thanks to Allen.
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