In this article the authors treat Woodrow Wilson's views on public ethics as an important link between the Founders, expecially the Federalists, and our current thinking about the ethical content of American public administration. Wilson's writings reveal an apparent effort to revisit and re-energize those central concerns of the Founders: citizen character, public virtue, and their relationship to the constitutional design of a democratic republic. The bedrock principle, common to the Federalist and Wilsonian views, is the channeling of self-interest into public-interested service. The Founders sought to achieve this through constitutional correctives such as checks and balances, a strong regard for reputation or honor, and education. Wilson addressed these same ends and means, but dressed in the context of increasing democratization and emerging professionalism and technicism. Despite his tentative claims for a politics/administration dichotomy in the 1887 essay, his broader writings betray a thorough understanding of administrative responsibility as an inherently political component of the regime. This understanding is reflected today in the advocacy of professional codes, and in attempts to educate public administrators in the salient values of the regime.