CHAPTER III.

Career of President McKinley-Raised to Rank of Captain and Brevet-Major in the Army-Romance of Early Life -Conspicuous Acts of Legislation During His Administration as President.

SSOCIATED with the glorious names and memories of Wash

ington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Lincoln and Grant as a man twice chosen in succession by the people to be the Chief Magistrate of the nation, at one of the great epochs in its history, the American who died at Buffalo September 14, had not yet completed the even threescore years of life, though in the fiftyeight years alloted to him in private life and in public place, he had run the whole gamut of human experience, nobly acquitting himself in each stage in a way that gave visible embodiment to American ideals and splendid traditions of things accomplished in all that he set his hands to do.

As a studious boy and gall nt soldier; then in private life an able lawyer skilled in his profession; a public man whose re-election seven times in succession to Congress represented the confidence and unerring belief of his own neighbors; as Governor and then as President, the broad patriotic statesman whose policies commanded regard at home and respect abroad, the boy born at Niles, O., on January 29, 1843, represented in his struggles and successes the typical American in a Republic which is opportunity for the humblest.

No President came of better stock, and it was to the sturdiness of frame and mind, and not to the mere accidents of birth or position, that made William McKinley a marked figure, whether as a boy of eighteen, serving the Union on the field of battle or as a President at fifty-three, planning policies that made it a nation high in the world's councils. The ancestors of the latest President of the United States were Covenanters in Scotland, Jacobites in Ireland, Revolutionary heroes in America-men who