His first administration had witnessed many events fraught with import to the nation’s history. He had been confronted with stupendous problems. The Panama Canal had been opened for traffic in August, 1915. The Mexican situation had grown more acute after the deposition of Madero and his death. In 1916, sixty thousand men of the United States National Guard and regulars had been stationed along the border. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified, thus providing for the direct election of United States Senators. The Federal Trade commission had been established, and the Clayton Anti-Trust measure enacted. For days the Suffragists had picketed the White House with their unfurled banners silently pleading their cause in their efforts to win presidential support. On this amendment the President had steadfastly refused to commit himself, although besieged publicly and privately. At one reception soon after his marriage, a prominent suffrage leader went through the line with her set suffrage appeal all ready to recite to the President when she should be presented. Instead, when she reached him and his wife, she gazed at Mrs. Wilson a minute and exclaimed enthusiastically: “Oh! Mrs. Wilson, you are so much _more_ beautiful than your pictures!” The speech was forgotten in the beaming smile she received from the President, who fully appreciated her statement and, turning to his wife, said triumphantly, “I told you so.” She always claimed that, in the end, the compliment was more effective than the speech would have been, although the next suffrage leader in line was able to say her bit without interruption. In February, 1916, Lindley M. Garrison, resigned his post as Secretary of War because of his dissatisfaction over the President’s attitude toward defense legislation. As Inauguration time approached, the issues of the campaign were still sending their echoes throughout the country. The upheaval of Europe was being felt in America. Students of the World War and its progress cannot fail to be impressed with the extremely difficult position of the United States as the principal neutral power. From the moment the Austrian tragedy unloosed the tempest, in the summer of 1914, embroiling all of Europe, down to the time of the destruction of the _Lusitania_, the volume of American sentiment had been swinging steadily, though more or less unconsciously, toward a demand that the horrors of the European type of warfare be terminated. Our own participation to force this end was a possibility that was pushed into the remote background of dreaded, unadmitted probabilities, despite the fact that the loudest clamour for continued neutrality found its expression in the campaign slogan of approval of Wilson’s policy, “He kept us out of war,” and brought him his reëlection.