He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation during the period when the country was emerging from the position of aloofness from world politics which it had maintained from the time Washington warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that the President has given him because his training has been as a stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is not the kind of training that one would give his son whom he wished to see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral possessions that he selected could do better than any one else. What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any public man in the United States displayed that justifies self-constituted critics in saying that the men selected by President Wilson are not their peers? It is universally admitted that President Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in America, using that word in its conventional, every-day sense and meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the "machine," than any President ever had. No one denies his statesmanship. He is, therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world weal for worldly advancement, and who lash themselves into a frenzied state by repetition of the admonitions of Washington or Monroe. It does not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the lustre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles that they enunciated and the practices that they initiated centuries ago are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of Hippocrates or Galen, because the one was the father of medicine and the other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow slavishly the teachings of Washington and Monroe.