commissioned officer, in the great war for national union, righteousness, and grandeur; he was one of those whom a kindly Providence permitted to take part in a struggle which ennobled every man who fought therein.

He who when little more than a boy had seen the grim steadfastness which after four years of giant struggle restored the Union and freed the slave was not thereafter to be daunted by danger or frightened out of his belief in the great destiny of our people.

Some years after the war closed McKinley came to Congress, and rose, during a succession of terms, to leadership in his party in the lower House. He also became governor of his native State, Ohio. During this varied service he received practical training of the kind most valuable to him when he became Chief Executive of the nation. To the high faith of his early years was added the capacity to realize his ideals, to work with his fellow-men at the same time that he led them.

President McKinley's rise to greatness had in it nothing of the sudden, nothing of the unexpected or seemingly accidental. Throughout his long term of service in Congress there was a steady increase alike in his power of leadership and in the recognition of that power both by his associates in public life and by the public itself. Session after session his influence in the House grew greater; his party antagonists grew to look upon him with constantly increasing respect, his party friends with constantly increasing faith and admiration. Eight years before he was nominated for President he was already considered a Presidential possibility. Four years before he was nominated only his own high sense of honor prevented his being made a formidable competitor of the chief upon whom the choice of the convention then actually fell. In 1896 he was chosen because the great mass of his party knew him and believed in him and regarded him as symbolizing their ideals, as representing

their aspirations. In estimating the forces which brought about his nomination and election I do not undervalue that devoted personal friendship which he had the faculty to inspire in so marked a degree among the ablest and most influential leaders; this leadership was of immense consequence in bringing about the result; but, after all, the prime factor was the trust in and devotion to him felt by the great mass of men who had come to accept him as their recognized spokesman. In his nomination the national convention of a great party carried into effect in good faith the deliberate judgment of that party as to who its candidate should be.

But even as a candidate President McKinley was far more than the candidate of a party, and as President he was in the broadest and fullest sense the President of all the people of all sections of the country.

His first nomination came to him because of the qualities he had shown in healthy and open political leadership, the leadership which by word and deed impresses itself as a virile force for good upon the people at large and which has nothing in common with mere intrigue or manipulation. But in 1896 the issue was fairly joined, chiefly upon a question which as a party question was entirely new, so that the old lines of political cleavage were in large part abandoned. All other issues sank in importance when compared with the vital need of keeping our financial system on the high and honorable plane imperatively demanded by our position as a great civilized power. As the champion of such a principle President McKinley received the support not only of his own party, but of hundreds of thousands of those to whom he had been politically opposed. He triumphed, and he made good with scrupulous fidelity the promises upon which the campaign was won. We were at the time in a period of great industrial depression, and it was promised for and on behalf of McKinley that if he were elected

our financial system should not only be preserved unharmed but improved and our economic system shaped in accordance with those theories which have always marked our periods of greatest prosperity.

The promises were kept and following their keeping came the prosperity which we now enjoy. All that was foretold concerning the well-being which would follow the election of McKinley has been justified by the event. But, as so often happens in our history, the President was forced to face questions other than those at issue at the time of his election. Within a year the situation in Cuba had become literally intolerable. President McKinley had fought too well in his youth, he knew too well at first hand what war really was, lightly to enter into a struggle. He sought by every honorable means to preserve peace, to avert war. He made every effort consistent with the national honor to bring about an amicable settlement of the Cuban difficulty. Then, when it became evident that these efforts were useless, that peace could not be honorably entertained, he devoted his strength to making the war as short and as decisive as possible. It is needless to tell the result in detail. Suffice it to say that rarely indeed in history has a contest so far-reaching in the importance of its outcome been achieved with such ease. There followed a harder task. As a result of the war we came into possession of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. In each island the conditions were such that we had to face problems entirely new to our national experience, and, moreover, in each island or group of islands the problems differed radically from those presented in the others. In Porto Rico the task was simple. The island could not be independent. It became in all essentials a part of the Union. It has been given all the benefits of our economic and financial system. Its inhabitants have been given the highest individual liberty, while yet their government has been

kept under the supervision of officials so well chosen that the island can be appealed to as affording a model for all such experiments in the future; and this result was mainly owing to the admirable choice of instruments by President McKinley when he selected the governing officials.

In Cuba, where we were pledged to give the island independence, the pledge was kept not merely in letter but in spirit. It would have been a betrayal of our duty to have given Cuba independence out of hand. President McKinley, with his usual singular sagacity in the choice of agents, selected in General Leonard Wood the man of all others best fit to bring the island through its uncertain period of preparation for independence, and the result of his wisdom was shown when last May the island became in name and in fact a free republic, for it started with a better equipment and under more favorable conditions than had ever previously been the case with any SpanishAmerican commonwealth.

Finally, in the Philippines, the problem was one of great complexity. There was an insurrectionary party claiming to represent the people of the islands and putting forth their claim with a certain speciousness which deceived no small number of excellent men here at home, and which afforded to yet others a chance to arouse a factious party spirit against the President. Of course, looking back, it is now easy to see that it would have been both absurd and wicked to abandon the Philippine Archipelago and let the scores of different tribes-Christian, Mohammedan, and pagan, in every stage of semicivilization and Asiatic barbarism-turn the islands into a welter of bloody savagery, with the absolute certainty that some strong power would have to step in and take possession. But though now it is easy enough to see that our duty was to stay in the islands, to put down the insurrection by force of arms, and then to establish

freedom-giving civil government, it needed genuine statesmanship to see this and to act accordingly at the time of the first revolt. A weaker and less far-sighted man than President McKinley would have shrunk from a task very difficult in itself, and certain to furnish occasion for attack and misrepresentation no less than for honest misunderstanding. But President McKinley never flinched. He refused to consider the thought of abandoning our duty in our new possessions. While sedulously endeavoring to act with the utmost humanity toward the insurrectionists, he never faltered in the determination to put them down by force of arms, alike for the sake of our own interest and honor, and for the sake of the interest of the islanders, and particularly of the great numbers of friendly natives, including those most highly civilized, for whom abandonment by us would have meant ruin and death. Again his policy was most amply vindicated. Peace has come to the islands, together with a greater measure of individual liberty and self-government than they have ever before known. All the tasks set us as a result of the war with Spain have so far been well and honorably accomplished, and as a result this nation stands higher than ever before among the nations of mankind.

President McKinley's second campaign was fought mainly on the issue of approving what he had done in his first administration, and specifically what he had done as regards these problems springing out of the war with Spain. The result was that the popular verdict in his favor was more overwhelming than it had been before.

No other President in our history has seen high and honorable effort crowned with more conspicuous personal success. No other President entered upon his second term feeling such right to a profound and peaceful satisfaction. Then by a stroke of horror, so strange in its fantastic iniquity as to stand unique in the black annals of crime, he was struck down. The brave, strong, gentle