With warmest regards from us all,

     Faithfully yours,

     WOODROW WILSON.

The debate which now took place in Congress proved to be one of the stormiest in the history of that body.  The proceeding did not prove to be the easy victory that the Administration had evidently expected.  The struggle was protracted for three months; and it signalized Mr. Wilson’s first serious conflict with the Senate—­that same Senate which was destined to play such a vexatious and destructive role in his career.  At this time, however, Mr. Wilson had reached the zenith of his control over the law-making bodies.  It was early in his Presidential term, and in these early days Senators are likely to be careful about quarrelling with the White House—­especially the Senators who are members of the President’s political party.  In this struggle, moreover, Mr. Wilson had the intelligence and the character of the Senate largely on his side, though, strangely enough, his strongest supporters were Republicans and his bitterest opponents were Democrats.  Senator Root, Senator Burton, Senator Lodge, Senator Kenyon, Senator McCumber, all Republicans, day after day and week after week upheld the national honour; while Senators O’Gorman, Chamberlain, Vardaman, and Reed, all members of the President’s party, just as persistently led the fight for the baser cause.  The debate inspired an outburst of Anglophobia which was most distressing to the best friends of the United States and Great Britain.  The American press, as a whole, honoured itself by championing the President, but certain newspapers made the debate an occasion for unrestrained abuse of Great Britain, and of any one who believed that the United States should treat that nation honestly.  The Hearst organs, in cartoon and editorial page, shrieked against the ancient enemy.  All the well-known episodes and characters in American history—­Lexington, Bunker Hill, John Paul Jones, Washington, and Franklin—­were paraded as arguments against the repeal of an illegal discrimination.  Petitions from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish societies were showered upon Congress—­in almost unending procession they clogged the pages of the Congressional Record; public meetings were held in New York and elsewhere where denouncing an administration that disgraced the country by “truckling” to Great Britain.  The President was accused of seeking an Anglo-American Alliance and of sacrificing American shipping to the glory of British trade, while the history of our diplomatic relations was surveyed in detail for the purpose of proving that Great Britain had broken every treaty she had ever made.  In the midst of this deafening hubbub the quiet voice of Senator McCumber—­“we are too big in national power to be too little in national integrity”—­and that of Senator Root, demolishing one after another the pettifogging arguments of the exemptionists, demonstrated that, after all, the spirit and the eloquence that had given the Senate its great fame were still influential forces in that body.