Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/514



Congress Hall had been restored to its original condition by the City of Philadelphia and was opened October 25, 1913, with ceremonies consisting of addresses, a military parade and a banquet. I had met Mr. Wilson when he delivered an address before the University of Pennsylvania and now was one of the committee to receive him. We met him at the train, when he arrived at Broad Street Station, lunched with him at the Bellevue-Stratford and escorted him to the hall where he made an address. He is about five feet nine inches in height, with sparse hair, eyes of no particular color, a clouded skin, lips a little too thick that wabble about and do not fit together well, a smile that lights up his face but suggests that it is a thing of habit, and a body spare almost to the extent of emaciation.

There are certain men whom I have encountered in life, some of them like William Sulzer and Israel Zangwill, who have reached distinction, who give me the impression that through generations of forefathers they have been unsufficiently fed. A lack of nutrition, due to poverty or to weakness of the stomach, has affected their bodies and necessarily also their mental action. I have always thought that John Calvin must have belonged to this type. They are generally strong-willed and, within certain limits, efficient, but their judgments are never to be trusted, because they are not broad enough to see consequences in their causes. They make such fatal mistakes as burning Michael Servetus to advance the cause of Christianity.

Wilson is a man of this build. While searching his features and contour, I felt that I could understand the character of the man who turned against the forces which elected him to the governorship of New Jersey; who, while looking for the presidency, asked Andrew Carnegie for a pension; who, while governor of his state, abandoned it and went to Bermuda; and who, calling the attention of the world to his first serious address to congress by going 494