The intimate papers of Colonel House arranged as a narrative by Charles Seymour.

CHAPTER IV
BUILDING A CABINET
You can never build a Cabinet to please everybody.... When you
have about concluded that you have the proper man, some one will come
along and condemn him so vigorously that it will make you doubt.
Therefore, in the end, you will have largely to determine their fitness
yourself.
House to Wilson, November 22, 1912
I
THE victory of 1912 was the first won by the Democrats in
a presidential election since 1892, an even twenty years.
This long exclusion from power laid a tremendous handicap
upon the party and its leaders when they came to organize
an administration; for in the United States the minority
suffers as much materially from being the under-dog as the
majority suffers morally from an over-long lease of control.
The older men of the party which has been in opposition
have developed critical rather than constructive faculties,
and it is long since they have exercised executive functions;
comparatively few younger men of capacity have been attracted to the party, and those few have had no administrative experience. What is worse, long political exile will
have sharpened every one's appetite for office, and the first
indication of success at the polls will sound like a dinner
gong, gathering the ravenous horde of anxious placehunters, whose ability is apt to be in inverse ratio to their
eagerness.
Mr. Wilson did not conceal from himself the particular
difficulties which he, as leader of the party and Presidentelect, must face. He was without political experience except
for his brief tenure of the New Jersey governorship. Although he always maintained that a college president found
ample opportunity to develop political genius, he did not,