AMERICA’S FEEBLE PRESIDENT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 298, 15 December 1914, Page 4

AMERICA’S FEEBLE PRESIDENT.

Referring to the recently-reported discovery of mines only fifty miles from Long Island which should make “Uncle Sam” wake up some as our American cousins would say, the special military correspondent of the Otago[ Daily Times further hazards that. President Wilson, like Hamlet, is op-1 pressed with too much thought or introspection. The United States needs at the present time a Horatio—a man of action at the helm of the ship of State, not 6 student. Shakespeare, with his remarkable insight into all things human, condemns all supine rulers and portrays the effects of their; rule in “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” andj “The Tempest.” In the two former) plays he shows the parlous condition! of the States that inept rulers pro-j duce, and in “Tho Tempest” he makes i the student Prospero awaken to a sense of his own shortcomings. The force of circumstances may convert) President Wilson into an' awakened) Prospero; and let us hope if Malines, Aerschot, and Louvain have not opened his eyes, something nearer home in the shape of a few straying globes of trinitrate of toluene will give him a clearer horizon and the decision necessary for the first statesman of a powerful nation. Perhaps he will not he so weak-kneed when a few native-born Americans are suddenly blown to pie-' ces or sent to the bottom of the sea. His attitude simply gives encouragement to the yellow press and to papers suborned by German gold, and incites breaches of neutrality throughout the length and breadth of that great country. The action of Chile and some other South American States puts the sovereign authority of the great'Union to shame. The best-thinking people in the United States—those who saved the honor in the country in connection with the unfair Panama Canal tolls—are on the side of the Allies, and that should give the President his cue. He will make a poor figure in the history of his time when it is written if he does not exercise the undoubted, weight of his country’s best opinions in such a manner that Germany and her agents may understand that her devious and reprehensible practices are viewed with abhorrence in America. Punch sums up. the characteristics of President Wilson. He is represented as a would-be cowboy, with a student air, holding the reins of a bucking broncho, and trying to find in a book what to do next.