In addition to meeting so the three pressing problems, the administration secured a law for a graduated income tax shifting the burden of government in part from the poor to the very rich. Quite as important was a new and needed protection given to labor unions. The courts had begun to threaten unions with punishment for strikes, under the provision of the Sherman law forbidding "conspiracies in restraint of trade." The Clayton Act expressly exempted labor combinations from such prosecution. "The labor of a human being," runs this noble provision, "is not an article of commerce." Equally pleasing to Labor was another law checking the tendency to "government by injunction." (Court interpretation has since rendered these last two acts of little avail to organized labor.)

President Wilson had long been known as a leading American scholar, a brilliant writer, and a great teacher and university president; but his warmest admirers had hardly hoped for such efficient leadership from "the schoolmaster in politics." This splendid constructive record was his work. Much of the legislation he planned in detail; all of it he helped plan; and he carried it all to victory by a party long unused to union and with large elements ready to rebel if they dared. He won his victory, too, not by abusing his power of patronage to keep Congressmen in line, but by sheer skill and force of character, aided by the general consciousness that the nation was rallying to his program.

846. The second half of this first term was darkened and confused by terrible foreign complications (§ 847 ff.); but these years, too, saw sound progress in domestic reform. A Good Roads law offered national aid to the States in building roads, so as to bring the farmer's market nearer to him. The SmithLever Agricultural Education Act offered coöperation with the States in teaching the farmer how to use the soil more profitably. And the Rural Credits' law made the first attempt in our history to get for the farmer the credit and the low interest commonly enjoyed by other business interests. The Railroad

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Eight-Hour law, hastily as it was enacted (§ 814), saved the country from unspeakable calamity and once more proved the President's sympathy with labor. A Workman's Compensation law (§ 813 e), of the most advanced character, was made to

apply to all Federal employees. And the Child-Labor law (§ 813 b) began to free the children of the South from crushing labor in factories and mines.

The last two of these bills had passed the House, but were being still held up in the Senate in August of 1916. The end of the session was near. President Wilson made one of his quiet visits to the Senate wing of the Capitol, met the Democratic leaders there, and demanded that they pass both bills before adjournment. The bills were passed. Said a hostile periodical-"That is 'politics' but it is politics in a high and statesmanlike sense of the word."

847. Foreign perils, however, were the chief mark of President Wilson's second two years, - foreign perils more complicated and threatening than any President before him had had to face. For years Mexico had been weltering in political assassination and revolution. Finally the "Constitutionalist" chief, Carranza, became master; remained so much longer than any recent predecessor, largely because of prompt recognition by the United States; and set himself stubbornly to the gigantic task of rebuilding his country with at first much show of progress. He did not prove able, it is true, to keep down revolt and brigandage in remote mountainous districts or on the American border. The Mexican people hate and fear the Americans, and bandits who repeatedly took American citizens from railroad trains to murder them, and who raided American towns across the border with every form of outrage were always sheltered among their own people. To one who knows only this side of the story it would seem that few wars have had more provocation than Mexico offered the United States.

On the other hand, lawless and violent Americans along the frontier have been guilty of numerous outrages on unprotected Mexican soil, of which the mass of Americans never hear. Great American "interests," too, hungry to seize for themselves raw wealth of oil and rubber, which Carranza was seeking to keep for a people's inheritance, constantly clamored for American intervention to “restore order" in Mexico. The skillful propaganda of these interests was the more dangerous because a deplorably large part of American society, with its customary harsh contempt for alien peoples, is easily led to believe that sooner or later we must "clean up " Mexico by taking it away from a race incapable of civilization. But President Wilson, with a noble sympathy for a distressed people feeling its way stumblingly toward a national life, held resolutely to a policy of "watchful waiting," and charged publicly that Mexican disorders were due largely to secret incitement and support from American interests determined to embroil the

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two countries. Critics derided his policy bitterly as responsible for the unavenged murder of American citizens. Admirers declared it right and wise. Nothing else, they urged, could have done so much to allay the ancient distrust felt toward us by all our Latin-American neighbors, whose friendship we so much desire. At the same time the Carranza government persisted in expressing bitter distrust of President Wilson, partly perhaps because on two occasions of extreme provocation he so far abandoned his general policy as to send troops into Mexico in both cases to little result.

Meantime in the Old World still heavier clouds had long been massing; and in July of 1914 had come a flash to set the world ablaze from the policy of the Austrian Empire toward her troublesome "Mexico," Serbia. The story of American history now becomes entangled inextricably with the complex web of world history.

PART XIII

THE WORLD WAR AND SINCE

CHAPTER LXVII

HOW THE WAR CAME

848. MOST wars, ancient and modern, have grown out of rivalries to control trade-routes and markets. The eighteenth century (p. 145 ff.) was an almost incessant struggle between European powers (grouped around France and England) for colonial empire which primarily meant monopoly of world trade. The Peace of 1763 (p. 146) stripped France of her possessions in Asia and America; and a half-century later, Waterloo confirmed England's place for the next seventy years as the only real colonial power. The surviving Spanish and Dutch empires were plainly in decay.

But steam and electricity were drawing the globe's most distant provinces into intimate unity, and the Industrial Revolution was spreading. That "Revolution" had transformed England by 1800, and the United States by 1825 (p. 449 ff.). By 1840 it had reached France; before 1870 it invaded Germany (Modern Progress, p. 509); and ere long it began to modify even inert Russia. Indeed our modern civilization is based in numberless ways upon this new industrialism; and the life blood of this industrial system is trade: trade not only with other civilized nations, but also for the products of tropical and subtropical

1 After 1850, England's trade supremacy was made less unendurable to other nations by her very liberal free-trade, or open-door, policy in her possessions.