MY DEAR JOHN,--I have received both of your letters, and I am very glad that you made that mistake regarding my address for it brought me two letters instead of one. I received your Continental Legal History months ago and thought that I had acknowledged it with all kinds of appreciation, but perhaps I only thought the things. ... I turned the book over to Minister Loudon of the Netherlands who knew the Dutch professor who had written one of the articles, and the rascal has not returned the book, but I shall get it from him one of these days. ... Washington is now greatly stirred because Wilson has frowned upon the Inaugural Ball--a very proper frown, to my way of thinking--but inasmuch as all of the merchants who advance money for the inaugural ceremonies recoup themselves from the receipts from the Inaugural Ball, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and Wilson will enter Washington, in my judgment, a very unpopular president, locally. The fact is, I think, he is apt to prove one of the most tremendously disliked men in Washington that ever has been here. He has a great disrespect for individuals, and so far as I can discover a very large respect for the mass. His code is a little new to us; and I feel justified in proceeding upon the theory that every man should help him, and that it is within his (Wilson's) proper function to throw Mr. Everyman down whenever public good requires it, and that his silence never estops him from interfering at any time. Perhaps you cannot make out just what this means. I am dictating, sitting in my room at home with a very bad cold, and perhaps I do not know precisely what I mean myself; but I am trying to say that under all circumstances Wilson regards himself as a free man, and that he is bound by no ties whatever to do anything or to follow any course; that he recognizes no such thing as consistency, or logic, or gratitude, as in the slightest embarrassing him. ... I do hope that the President will get some capable effective administration officers who will take the burden of patronage off his shoulders and give him a chance to think on the money question, which is his big problem. I like his Chicago speech, I like his New York speech, but I do not find many people who understand him, because he is really a sort of philosopher. He teaches the psychology of new thought, the influence and effect of thought upon government.