Governor McKinley does not know to this day, with the possible exception of four or five names, who contributed the money.

"When Governor McKinley saw the publication of the subscription scheme he wrote me absolutely declining to receive a dollar. Mr. Hanna and his other friends told him to leave the matter alone, for if his friends wished to assist him they should have the privilege."

Myron T. Herrick, of Cleveland, was treasurer of the fund and took up the paper as fast as presented.

Mrs. McKinley's property was then deeded back to her. She is worth to-day probably $75,000. McKinley has his original $20,000 and a little more. He saved nothing, it is said, during his second term as Governor.

The matter has been referred to as showing a lack of business ability on the part of Governor McKinley. This is hardly justified. George Tod, whose business ability will not be questioned, says he would have endorsed Robert Walker's paper for half a million dollars the day before his failure. Such being his standing and such the close personal relations between the two men it is not strange that McKinley endorsed for Walker to a large amount.

This is a perfectly straight story. Major McKinley and his wife were good for the money, and resolved to pay all the obligations and returned the first subscriptions; but the final arrangement to take up McKinley's paper as fast as presented was so organized

he was constrained to submit to its execution. The whole transaction was one of undue confidence in the business ability, integrity, and standing of a friend, and the initiation of it was in the payment of a debt of gratitude. It is a chapter in the career of a man who has given his labor for the general benefit, paying scant attention to personal interests; and the fact that Governor McKinley was saved for the public service is most creditable to the gentlemen who are responsible for the adjustment, and the action of the Governor himself was in every detail of his contact with it that of a man of absolute probity.

CHAPTER VI.

MCKINLEY NOT A MAN OF ONE IDEA.

His superior distinction as a protectionist has caused him to be erroneously accused of exclusive devotion to that subject-The great range of his public speeches and addresses-A superb tribute from General Grosvenor, giving a list of subjects.

T

HE reputation of Major McKinley as the foremost champion of the American system of protection has for some years been familiar to all civilized people. He represents the American idea, and is as prominently in the eye of the public in England, France, Germany, and Austria as in his own country, and is in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Russia a man of mark in all business communities, and of immense conspicuity in all commercial circles and manufacturing towns; and so far as the Asiatics are interested in the affairs European and American, they are informed of McKinley as the man who stands for the principle that the Americans should diversify their industries and aid home markets with home manufactories, mingling producers and consumers on the same soil, aiding the farmers by diverting labor to other occupations than agricultural, and

causing competition among our own manufacturers in our own markets, by protecting them from foreign intrusion upon conditions unfavorable to our higher and broader interests. There is a curious bitterness of personal hostility abroad to Major McKinley. In some of the manufacturing districts of Germany, McKinley is regarded as a public enemy-almost a monster. American children in German schools have been astonished, offended, and mortified by these manifestations of feeling, and of one thing Americans can be sure, and it is that those who make a virtue in England or the Continental countries of Europe, of being hostile to McKinley, are not animated by apprehensions that his policy is injurious to the people of the United States. They hold that he is disposed to build up his own country at the expense of Europe; that his statesmanship is American, but not cosmopolitan, and that is not an unreasonable conclusion.

It was the earliest fame of McKinley in Congress and as a Republican politician on the stump that he made his protection speeches intensely interesting, and that no one else did so with the same certainty and efficacy; and it was out of this that the unwarranted impression grew that the discussion of the tariff was his sole specialty. In truth no one had a greater range of subjects. Born in a manufacturing town-in his youth up to the time he became a boy soldier, seventeen years of age-one of those intently interested in the prosperity of the manufacturing industries that demanded the protection that was

declared in the first law passed by the American Congress, McKinley was a student of this great matter from infancy, and the facts and sentiments of the manufacturing people were for him in the air he breathed; and he saw and felt the advancing importance of the issues of protection because the world was at last so small that the nations over the sea were our neighbors. Liverpool was, in Henry Clay's time, further from American ports, than Can-ton and Melbourne now are, and the manufacturing districts of England are closer to us, in time and cost of transportation, than Connecticut was at the beginning of the War of States. The same thing may be said of Germany and Massachusetts.

McKinley grew up with the question and was its master long before he was its expounder fronting the world, and its champion at home. He is popular here for the same reason that he is unpopular abroad. His name has swept the country as a Presidential candidate, because of its unquestionable and unexampled significance. The meaning of it is plain to the people, and what it means they want. He has friends who have been ardent and able organizers and workers-but they have only handled the material that was abundant and seasoned. The fire was not kindled in green wood-with laborious pains. The woods were ready to burn and the wind was fair. The people have done this thing themselves and they will see it through. They are dissatisfied with the free-trade experiments of Mr. Cleveland.