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truth, "There is no man in the country more deeply attached to our republican institutions than the candidate of the Democratic party." When the fiery Ben Tillman of South Carolina began to make an ominous comparison between the situation in 1896 and that of his own state in 1860, he was hissed down by the Chicago convention. The crusade of the Popocrats, in spite of their violent language, had little of the grimness of the crusade of the abolitionists. There was no "irrepressible conflict" precipitated by the race question. There were no Calhouns and Davises with their unyielding dogma of states' rights. The malcontents of 1896 were asking for an extension and not a limitation of the powers of the Federal government. Moreover, the people of the West were bound to the East by social ties which never existed between the old states of the North and the South. Decade after decade emigrants from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and the eastern states of the Mississippi basin had moved out to the prairies and mining camps of the West, carrying with them the family names, the customs, the political and religious faith of the communities from which they had sprung. These bands were as strong as steel compared with the academic arguments of even a matchless Webster for the supreme authority of a Constitution which had been the subject of conflicting interpretation in its power over the states ever since its adoption. The legal bond of a common Constitution had snapped like a thread under the strain of distrahent social and economic interests. The grievances of the Western farmer in 1896 were no less real than those of the Southern planter in 1860, but the Western farmer had no thought of remedying those grievances by any other appeal than to the government to which he and his fathers had given their undivided allegiance.

Finally, the election of 1896 was the triumph of the business man in politics. It may be that McKinley would have been nominated at St. Louis without Hanna's aid. He always mildly resented any hint that he was "discovered" by Hanna.1 But

1 McKinley told the Washington representative of the Associated Press that he believed that in view of his prominence as an officer in the army, a member of Congress for fourteen years, the author of the McKinley bill, the governor of Ohio

whether he could have been elected without Hanna's aid is more doubtful. His decisive victory at the polls was made possible by the unstinted use of the funds which the corporations poured into the Republican campaign chest under Hanna's relentless assessment. The Republican victory meant the vindication of Hanna's fundamental doctrine of the identity of the political and economic interests of the country and the dependence of the stability of the government upon the prosperity of big business. No one need look for any legislation to hector the railroads, hamper the bankers, or curb the trusts in President McKinley's administration.

On the fourth of March, 1897, Grover Cleveland willingly turned the responsibilities of State over to his successor and retired to a modest home in Princeton, New Jersey, to spend the decade of life that was left to him and to find some recompense for the bitter trials of his official career in the devotion of his growing family, the high respect of the faculty and students of the university, and the increasing esteem of his fellow countrymen. No president since Abraham Lincoln had had burdens as heavy as his to bear; and he had borne them with uncomplaining Spartan courage. He had not always been right, but he had always been righteous. If he had often failed in tact, he had never failed in truth. In all his career he had kept unswervingly faithful to the ideal which he had confessed in the letter to his brother, written on the evening of his election to the governorship of New York: "To perform the duties assigned me with an eye single to the interests of my employers."

for two terms, and the recipient of 180 votes in the convention of 1892, he was "sufficiently well known to receive the nomination" (A. W. Dunn, "From Harrison to Harding," Vol. I, p. 227).

1 This is not to imply that the money was used improperly. It was spent mostly for speakers, printing, postage, and traveling expenses. Hanna was a man of frank and honest dealing. He was a big-hearted man, too. The coarse cartoons of Davenport and Opper depicting him as a bloated lummox, covered with dollar marks and crushing men, women, and children under his huge foot, were a cruel slander which he felt keenly. Everyone who knew Mark Hanna, from his humblest employee to his colleagues in the United States Senate, respected and loved him. "Hanna has not a small trait in his nature," said Theodore Roosevelt.

In November, 1886, President Cleveland was the guest of honor at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College. He was felicitously greeted by James Russell Lowell as the hero of Horace's immortal ode

The just man holding firm his purpose
Against the evil bidding of the crowd.

The tribute was doubly deserved when the doors of the White House closed upon him for a second time.

CHAPTER V

"DOMINION OVER PALM AND PINE"

We have not the choice as to whether or not this country will play a great part in the world. All we can decide is whether we will play it well or ill. THEODORE ROOSEVELT

OUR WAR WITH SPAIN

"I am deeply sorry, Mr. President," said Cleveland to McKinley on returning from the inauguration exercises to the White House, "to pass on to you a war with Spain. It will come within two years. Nothing can stop it." The war came in little more than a year; and it came because the American people decided, after many months of patient remonstrance, that they would no longer tolerate a nuisance at their very door. The island of Cuba, a possession of Spain since the days of Columbus, had long been restive under the corrupt and crushing colonial administration of the Spanish officials. The Ten Years' War of 1868-1878, which had for a moment threatened to involve the United States on account of the Virginius affair (p. 68, note 1), had ended with promises from Madrid of fiscal reform and political autonomy. But the promises had never been fulfilled. In 1895 the smoldering embers of revolt again broke out in flaming revolution. The war was waged with intense cruelty on both sides. The insurgent Cubans, under the leadership of General Máximo Gómez, too few and ill-armed to meet the Spaniards in open battle, reverted to guerrilla warfare, ambush, assassination, and devastation. They cut the cane and burned the mills of the sugar plantations, and carried destruction through the eastern part of the island. To meet terror with terror, the Spanish government early in 1896 sent a fiendish governor-general to Cuba in the person of Valeriano Weyler, who set about to end the revolution by exterminating the peas

antry which gave it support. He drove tens of thousands of families from their farms into concentration camps near the fortified towns, where, deprived of the barest necessities of life and herded like beasts in the slaughter pen, they perished of starvation and disease.

It was not alone moral indignation at the fate of these wretched "reconcentrados" that aroused the United States to protest. Our citizens had some $50,000,000 invested in the mines, railroads, and sugar and tobacco plantations of the island, which were being ruined by the guerrillas, who roamed at will over three fourths of the inland country. Our trade with Cuba had grown to nearly $100,000,000 in the year before the insurrection broke out. Many Cubans had been naturalized in the United States, and either returned to their native country or remained here to work for the insurgent cause. American citizens of Cuban birth in the island were often cast into prison, and even native Americans in Cuba were subjected to insults by Spanish officials. The sympathy of our people for the insurgents was so strong that it was possible for the Cuban junta established in New York to collect large sums of money for food, arms, and munitions to aid the revolutionists. Nevertheless our government observed the rules of neutrality with the utmost care. President Cleveland issued a proclamation on January 12, 1895, warning all citizens of the United States against "setting on foot or providing or preparing the means for military enterprises to be carried on from the United States against the territory of the government of Spain." So efficient was the work of our officials charged with policing three thousand miles of seacoast from Maine to Texas that President McKinley could truthfully say in his message of December, 1897, that not a single military expedition or armed vessel had been permitted to leave our shores in violation of the neutrality laws.

The platforms of both the great parties in 1896 contained resolutions on Cuba. The Democrats merely "extended their sympathy to the people of Cuba in their heroic struggle for liberty and independence"; but the Republicans, declaring that Spain had "lost control of Cuba" and was "unable to protect

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