On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President of the United States, and thus became the central figure of a new and tremendously important movement. He was, it is true, elected as the candidate of what is known as the Democratic party, which has existed since the days of Thomas Jefferson. But the ideas advanced by President Wilson as being democratic were so different from the original theories and policies of Jefferson that President Wilson himself felt called on to formulate his principles in a now celebrated work entitled "The New Freedom." From the opening pages of this, as originally published in _The World's Work_, we here, by permission of both the President and the magazine, give his own statement of the ideas of the new era. The voting body of Americans who stand behind President Wilson are obviously of the type now generally called progressive. In the convention which nominated him, the conservative element of the old Democracy struggled long and bitterly against the naming of any "progressive" candidate. In the Republican party, the strife between conservatism and progress was so bitter as to produce a complete split; and the progressives nominated a candidate of their own, preferring, if they could not control the government themselves, to hand it over to the progressive element among the Democrats. The former political parties in the United States seem to have been so completely disrupted by recent events that even though they continue to hold some power under the old names, they now stand for wholly different things. The two parties which in the triangular presidential contest polled the largest numbers of votes were both "progressive." So it seems settled that we are to "progress." But whither--and into what? Is there any clear purpose before our new leaders, and how does it differ from mankind's former purposes? That is what President Wilson tries to tell us. There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago.