While these works of progress were carried out “the University reorganized all its services, reviewed the study plans, improved the teaching material and disciplined the teaching staff, a work that culminated in the university law of 1908, prepared and promulgated during his Presidency.”[3] Wílliman was a member of the Uruguayan Colorado Party and was closely identified with the liberal José Batlle y Ordóñez.

Williman was a incorporated into a group that maintained the resistance against the Government of General Santos, taking an active part in the journalistic campaigns of the time.

Williman invaded with the expeditionary army and fought in the action of Palmares de Soto, later, according to one study, “falling prisoner with the best of the revolutionary youth.” On returning home he closed the first cycle of his political activity and for many years devoted himself exclusively to the activity of the professor, to the management of the university institution and to the work of his law firm.

[18] Williman had called for the establishment of a Labor Office or institute, “destined to study everything that is related to the progress of the industries and the aspirations of the workers, in order to cooperate in the solution of the questions and conflicts and, prepare the most opportune legislation in this matter.”[19] Through Law 3,147 of 1907 the Ministry of Industry, Labor and Public Instruction was established.

According to one study “In the departments there were innumerable road works, construction of bridges, sanitation, municipal services, canalizations, dredging, authorization of ports, layout and extension of railways, carried out by the same administration, whose intense work was translated in the economic and financial order in the constantly reproduced fact of the "surplus" in the annual exercises.” 392 schools were also built, almost all of which rural.

[25] A law of February the 24th 1911, “completely regulated the loss and restitution of parental authority, guardianship of minors and the creation of the Council for the Protection of Minors,”[26] and a law of 1908 “recognized the right of all mothers to proper maternity care,” although in the absence of any machinery this was “a counsel of perfection” until Montevideo in 1915 opened its maternity hospital with 150 beds.

As established by this project, employers or entrepreneurs who are in charge of exploiting an industry or carrying out work included in this law (such as mines, quarries, factories, metallurgical workshops, mines, quarries and factories) “were civilly liable for all accidents that occur to their workers or employees due to their work or due to it.” Pensions would be provided in cases of absolute or permanent incapacity, partial and permanent disability, temporary disability, and death.

"[35] That same year the Executive Power offered a pension scheme for agricultural and industrial workers whose annual wage didn’t exceed $300.

A plan was also devised by the Insurance Bank “but the lack of satisfactory statistics, the unwillingness of business to submit to the mounting expense of social legislation, and the absence of any wide margin in the wage scale that might be used for employee contributions to a pension fund, checked the acceptance of these plans.” The extension of the retirement pension system to private industry later began with the passage of a law of the 6th of October 1919 that provided for the pensioning of employees in the water, telephone, tramway, telegraph, railway and gas distributing services.

[37] When his presidential term ended, Williman resigned authority into the hands of his successor and left shortly after for Europe on a rest trip.

[38] Wílliman lived to see much of his and Battle y Ordóñez's democratic legacy destroyed — at least temporarily — by President Gabriel Terra, who reinforced his presidential rule in a coup d'état in 1933.

Williman was seen as the de facto caretaker president of Uruguay chosen by José Batlle y Ordóñez to succeed him after his first term in office.

Williman, however, disliked the idea of being seen as a stand-in for Batlle, telling an historian in 1905 that “Neither by temperament, by education, nor by the principles I have always maintained would I have agreed to a merely inert and purely decorative retention of the government.