"Let the motion be put and let everybody favorable to the nomination of Blaine vote against it."

That settled it. Under Major McKinley's leadership, assumed spontaneously and boldly, the Blaine men accepted the challenge, the motion fcr an adjournment was voted down, and the victory was won. It was not defeat that Major McKinley turned aside—the situation was not so serious as that-but in a crisis, when the Blaine men were getting demoralized and the convention was turning itself into a mob, the Major, leaping to the front, by one command marshaled the Blaine men into line and pressed them forward to their already sighted victory. Major McKinley was chairman of the committee on resolutions at that convention, and when he appeared to read the platform he received an ovation that was one of the features of that great event.

Major McKinley's next appearance at a Republican national convention was in 1888, and this time he came at the head of the Ohio delegation, and in John Sherman's behalf. At this convention Mr. McKinley conspicuously illustrated his character for loyalty to his friends and his word. No candidate had been able to secure a majority. Sherman, Alger, Allison, Harrison, Gresham, and Depew, all had a strong following, but none was near a nomination. Major McKinley, at the head of the Ohio delegation, instructed to vote his delegation solidly for Sherman, was one of the heroes of the convention. His entrance at each session was greeted with the wildest enthusiasm. Day and night he was at work among the various state delegations, laboring to secure votes for Ohio's great financier. On the sixth ballot a delegate voted for William McKinley, and was greeted by cheers which swelled again and again before silence could be restored. The next state that was called cast seventeen votes for Major McKinley, and again the cheers broke forth. The drift was unmistakably setting toward McKinley like an ocean tide.

Everyone expected to see the Garfield nomination of 1880 repeated. But they were disappointed. The roll call was interrupted by the Major, who, leaping upon a chair at the end of the middle aisle, pale, but calm and determined, uttered a speech which, unpremeditated as it was, has seldom been surpassed for eloquence, candor and unselfish loyalty. In it he declared his inability to be a candidate with honor to himself, and proclaimed his unswerving loyalty to the Ohio chieftain. The tide was turned. On the seventh ballot Benjamin Harrison was named, but McKinley went home to Ohio stronger than ever in the hearts of his fellow men.

Some time before the Republican National Convention of 1892, held in Minneapolis, Minn., June 7, Governor McKinley had privately and publicly expressed himself as in favor of the renomination of President Harrison. Having committed himself, the Governor stood by his declaration. He was elected a delegate-at-large as a Harrison man, and the understanding was that Ohio would vote solidly for the President's nomination.

The convention elected Governor McKinley its permanent chairman. R. M. Nevin of Dayton was his alternate. Before he took the chair as presiding officer the Governor specifically charged Mr. Nevin to vote for Harrison. Only one vote was taken on the nomination for President. When Ohio was called ex-Governor Foraker said Ohio asked time for a consultation, and after a pause the vote of the state was announced as: Harrison, 2 votes; William McKinley, 44. Chairman McKinley immediately sprang from his seat and shouted:

"I challenge the vote of Ohio!"

A brief and animated debate then ensued between ex-Governor Foraker and Governor McKinley, in which Foraker told the chairman that he had ceased to be a member of the Ohio delegation on assuming the post of presiding officer, and could not be recognized. Finally a roll call of the Ohio delegation was ordered, and this resulted, McKinley, 45; Harrison, I. The only vote for Harrison cast by the Ohio delegation was that cast by Governor McKinley's alternate. President Harrison was renominated on the first and only ballot, but the Governor had 182 votes cast for him despite the fact that he was not a candidate. At the conclusion of the balloting Governor McKinley took the floor and moved that the President's nomination be made unanimous, and the motion carried. The Governor was chosen chairman of the commission that officially notified the President of his nomination.

The result of the campaign of 1892 was a surprise to both the leading political parties. Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate for president, was elected, and both the house and senate had large Democratic majorities. The political revolution was remarkable, and was largely due to the Populist movement, and to fusion between the Populists and Democrats in the South and West. The clamor for the free coinage of silver, at the ratio of 16 to 1, and the industrial depression which set in in 1893, brought Governor McKinley into the public eye as the man calculated to restore prosperity to the country. Meanwhile he adhered strictly to his duties as governor of Ohio.

1

CHAPTER XVIII.

FIRST NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT.

At no time in the history of the Republican party has there been such an array of brilliant and worthy men before the country named for the honor of Presidential candidates as at that period when the National Republican Convention of 1896 was to make a choice from the shining list. That convention was remarkable and unique, more so than any other convention of this organization, whose first President, a pioneer of universal freedom, a pathfinder across the western wilderness that is now an empire, Colonel John Charles Fremont, who was presented for the suffrage of the people forty years before. That pioneer candidate was defeated because the day of broad thought had not arisen. The rising storm of civil strife swept the next candidate of the party, immortal Lincoln, to the highest place in the nation, from whence he guided the Republic and its destinies through the raging tempest until an assassin's missile laid him low, and that at the moment when the country could least have spared him, and when it seemed that fate to be just might have been more kindly to both him and his people, for he deserved to enjoy the fruit of his work, and the people would have had pleasure and profit in his presence.

Of no other such conventions is there a more interesting story than that which might be given of the convention at St. Louis in June, 1896, which made William McKinley its candidate, and who is another martyr of the Republic, slain by organized assassination, because the nation had placed him in conspicuous exaltation.

Of the great ones whose personal partisans and whose high places among the people had made them prominent in the premises, Thomas B. Reed of Maine was among the foremost. He was without a superior among that many for intelligence, wit and general ability, and there can be no question that, had he been nominated and elected as Chief Magistrate, he would have given the country a worthy and thoroughly, even distinctly, American adminis tration.

William B. Allison of Iowa, who was a delegate to the Chicago convention of 1860, that nominated Abraham Lincoln, and a Senator, who had made a national and well-deserved fame for patriotic statesmanship, was another, now