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Updated: June 29, 2025
The New Jersey delegation is commissioned to represent the great cause of Democracy and to offer you as its militant and triumphant leader a scholar, not a charlatan; a statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains, without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not a defamer of characters and lives; a man whose mind is at once cosmopolitan and composite of America; a gentleman of unpretentious habits, with the fear of God in his heart and the love of mankind exhibited in every act of his life; above all a public servant who has been tried to the uttermost and never found wanting matchless, unconquerable, the ultimate Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
In the minds of these objectors the only alternative to deductive thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Bülow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported to have said: 'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma.
Perhaps at this point some fair-minded reader may say, "Is there not something to be said in favor of the Doctrinaire? Is he not, after all, a very useful character? How could any great reform be pushed through without his assistance?" Yes, dear reader, a great deal may be said in his favor. He is often very useful.
Danton instantly discerned that the problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries. Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid the perplexities of practice.
These things ought to be obvious, but unfortunately in these times, which call for eminently practical thought and effort, there is a curious doctrinaire spirit abroad, and the theorist is continually encouraged to imagine how much better things would be if everything were quite different, whereas what we want is the application of practical common sense to practical facts as they are.
But all the buffetings of fortune failed to drive it from the young Buonaparte; and when despair as to his future might have impaired the vigour of his domineering instincts, his mind and will acquired a fresh rigidity by coming under the spell of that philosophizing doctrinaire, Rousseau. There was every reason why he should early be attracted by this fantastic thinker.
A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man's Land. Even the stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted. It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the matter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire. "How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to do?"
M. Blanc, placed on the borders of democracy and socialism, one degree lower than the Republic, two degrees beneath M. Barrot, three beneath M. Thiers, is also, whatever he may say and whatever he may do, a descendant through four generations from M. Guizot, a doctrinaire. "Certainly," cries M. Blanc, "we are not of those who anathematize the principle of authority.
It is a task which has been the more difficult because not merely was there a difference of races, but one race was of the same blood as the people of the United Kingdom and the other of its hereditary foe. It was always easy for politicians of the baser sort, or for well-meaning but rigid and doctrinaire extremists on either side, to stir up prejudice and passion.
The stiff-necked commonwealth men, with their doctrinaire republicanism, were standing out for their constitutional ideas, blind to the fact that the royalists were all the while undermining the ground beneath the feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, Parliament and army.
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