One of the most important facts about news is that while it can be distributed by machines, machines cannot make it, and as a rule they do not understand it.  Important and critical news is almost always fresh and made by hand the first time.  Most of the popular news as to what is practical in American polities for the last forty years has been produced by political machines, and of course men who were a good deal like machines were the best men to finish the ideas off and to carry them out.

As a result of course, all the really big leaders for the last forty years, our most powerful and interesting personalities have been shut out from being President of the United States.  The White House was merely being run as machinery and did not interest them.  They watched it grinding its ideas faithfully out from year to year of what America was like and what American politicians were like, and finally at last in the clatter of the machines there rings out suddenly across the land a shot that no machinery had allowed for.  Before any one knows almost there slips suddenly by the side door into the White House a really interesting man, and suddenly, all in one minute, almost, this man makes being President of the United States the most interesting lively and athletic feat in the country.  And now, apparently that the idea has been worked out in public before everybody, by hand, as it were, that a man can be alive and interesting all over, can have at least a little touch of news about him and still be a President in this country, another man with some news in him has been allowed to us and suddenly politics throughout all America has become a totally new revealing profession, and men, instead of being selected because they were blurred personalities, the ghosts of compromises, would-be everybodies—­men who had not decided who they were, and who could not settle down and let people know which of their characters they had hit on at last to be really theirs, men who had no cutting edge to do things, screw-drivers trying to be chisels—­were revealed to our people at last as vague, mean, other-worldly persons, not fitting into our real American world at all, and hopelessly visionary and impracticable in American politics.

And now one more hand-made man has been allowed to us.

The machines run very still in the White House.

The people of this country no longer go by the White House on their way to their business and just hear it humdrumming and humdrumming behind the windows as of yore.  The nation stands in crowds around the gates and would like to see in.  The people wonder.  They wonder a million columns a day what is inside.

What is inside?

An American who governs by being news, himself.

The first thing that the people demand from our President now is that he shall be news himself.  The news that they have selected to know first during the next four years—­have put into the White House to know first is Woodrow Wilson.