Chapter I: Preface

I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.

And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting. They have been suffered to run their unpremeditated course even at the cost of such repetition and redundancy as the extemporaneous speaker apparently inevitably falls into.

The book is not a discussion of measures or of programs. It is an attempt to express the new spirit of our politics and to set forth, in large terms which may stick in the imagination, what it is that must be done if we are to restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in what concerns us only as families and individuals, to its purity, its self-respect, and its pristine strength and freedom. The New Freedom is only the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.

WOODROW WILSON.

CONTENTS

Preface vii

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Old Order Changeth 3
II. What is Progress? 33
III. Freemen Need No Guardians 55
IV. Life Comes from the Soil 79
V. The Parliament of the People 90
VI. Let There Be Light 111
VII. The Tariff-"Protection," or Special Privilege? 136
VIII. Monopoly, or Opportunity? 163
IX. Benevolence, or Justice? 192
X. The Way to Resume is to Resume 223
XI. The Emancipation of Business 257
XII. The Liberation of a People's Vital Energies 277

THE NEW FREEDOM