ABSTRACT
In September 1875, after fifteen months of illness, Thomas Woodrow Wilson went to Princeton desperately determined to overcome his weakness and to make himself the leader his Super-Ego demanded. In the autumn of 1876 he read one day an article in an English magazine on "The Orator" in which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright were described and praised for possessing just such qualities as Wilson was convinced that he possessed. The reader has perhaps observed that the same person appears in Wilson's original statement of his intention to become a statesman at the age of sixteen and in his final decision at the age of twenty: Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone may have been installed as the object of Tommy Wilson's newly awakened aggression by some other mechanism; there is no doubt whatever that Gladstone did begin to represent the "incomparable father" of Tommy Wilson's childhood.
