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MRS. BRYAN.

On the other hand, Mr. Bryan is equally fortunate, although in another way. He is only thirty-six, and his wife is not yet thirty. Although she has a young family of four, she has been his inseparable companion in his brief but brilliant political cafeer. Rumour indeed credits her with no small share in the composition of those speeches with which he has electrified the nation, and it is noted that it is only when she is present that he achieves his greatest successes. Like Mrs. McKinley, she had the best of educations, and was the head of her college class at the same time when her husband held a similar position in his college. Their marriage was the lovematch of young people, and Mrs. Bryan set herself at once to assist her husband in his profession. She studied law and was admitted to the Bar, and her position as her husband's better half was so universally recognised by the party which has selected him as its candidate, that at the final balloting of the

Convention, it almost created a panic of fear that Bryan would lose without her presence. At that juncture a page brought a message that Mrs. Bryan was at the door seeking admission, as she had lost her ticket. In a few moments the chairman of the delegation returned with a sigh of relief-Mrs. Bryan was in the hall. On the voting day, Mr. Bryan peered over the faces on the stage, and when he saw his wife amoug the spectators, smiled with sweet confidence, and turning to his comrades in the delegation, said with deep faith in his future success, "Now for the ballot, our Mascot is here."

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TWO GOOD-LIVING, RE-
LIGIOUS CANDIDATES.

No one seems to think it worth while to set forth the views of either candidate on the subject of woman's suffrage; but on both sides the wife is only less important than the husband. Another point of interest is that both candidates are men of strong religious principle, both are Church members, and are steady upholders of their respective Churches. Mr. McKinley is a Methodist and Mr. Bryan a Presbyterian. Of the two, Mr. Bryan seems to be more actively engaged in religious work, but there seems every reason to believe that the campaign will be fought out without what has too often been the deluge of calumnions misrepresentations against the champions on either side.

MRS. BRYAN.

Chicago Convention his partisans shrank with almost superstitious reluctance from going to the final ballots until they were assured Mrs. Bryan was in the hall. "When the Nebraskan delegation," says the Times Herald reporter of Chicago, "ascertained that Mrs. Bryan was not in the hall during the early hours of the

I. WILLIAM MCKINLEY: A STUDY

OF HIS CHARACTER AND CAREER.
BY EUGENE V. SMALLEY.

WILLIAM MOKINLEY, SENIOR, the father of Virginia, North Carolina, central and southern Ohio and

Governor McKinley, was one of the pioneer ironmasters of eastern Ohio. The elder McKinley seems to have inherited his bent for metal working from his maternal grandfather, Andrew Rose, who was sent home to Bucks county, Pennsylvania, from the Revolutionary army, to make bullets and cannon. The Roses traced back to a Puritan ancestor who went from England to Holland with his co-religionists and followed the Pilgrims to America. The McKinleys are of the vigorous and prolific Scotch-Irish stock that has left as broad and permanent an impress upon the middle belt of the United States as the Puritan stock has left upon the northern belt, from New England to Oregon. The Scotch-Irish element never has had its full due at the hands of historians. Too much stress has been placed upon the influence of the New England element in the formation of our national character. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania,

Kentucky it is from the Scotch-Irish strain of blood that has come a very large proportion of the statesmen, jurists and successful men of affairs. The dominant traits of this virile stock are industry, thrift, strong religions convictions and serious views of life. It is a large-boned, muscular, long-lived race, and it has kept up its fecundity to our own day, whereas the New England stock has become so barren that in its original home it hardly keeps its numbers good.

The grandfather of William McKinley, senior, was a Revolutionary soldier, and the biographers of Governor McKinley all dwell upon the paternal line of ancestry in seeking for the currents of hereditary tendency which have gone to the making of the famous statesman, and pay small attention to the maternal line; yet a very slight acquaintance with the Governor's mother, who is now in her eighty-seventh year, is enough to convince

one that it is from her and not from his father that he gets his leading traits of character. He resembles her strongly in face, in manner, and in many mental peculiarities. She was an Allison, of Scotch Covenanter stock. There were Allisons among the victims of Claverhouse's dragoons, and there were other Allisons who after long imprisonment for conscience sake left their homes in the lowlands and sought religious freedom in the American colonies. Nancy Allison McKinley is an exceedingly competent, strong-brained woman. She is the mother of nine children, all of whom lived to maturity, and seven of whom are still living. She is profoundly religious and at the same time intensely practical. Sho imparted the stamp of her vigorous character to all her offspring. There was no black sheep in her flock. The children grew up to be serious, competent, independent men and woman. William was the seventh child.

BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY HOME LIFE.

The senior William McKinley, born in 1807, lived to be eighty-five. He was only twenty years old when he married Nancy Allison, aged eighteen. He was interested in furnaces and foundries in Columbiana county for many years, and most of the children were born at New Lisbon, but in 1843, when his seventh child was born, he was managing a furnace at Niles, in Trumbull county. The family lived in a long, low two-story frame building, in one end of which a country store was kept. The sojourn in Niles was of but short duration. The mother, always the guiding spirit in the household, was anxious about the education of the children, and Niles was only a petty village of ironworkers, and its sole educational equipment was the country district school. About twenty miles to the south, down the Mahoning Valley, was the village of Poland, which

possessed a seminary for boys and girls of the type of the New England academy-a type reproduced in many of the towns on the Western Reserve of Ohio. Mrs. McKinley set her mind on Poland as a good place to rear her large family, and when the boy William was two years old she persuaded the father to make the important move. In Poland the McKinleys established themselves in a large white painted wooden house, with green blinds, of a style of architecture very common on the Western Reserve and brought from New England by the first settlers. This house is still standing, but the birthplace house in Niles was recently demolished. In the Poland house young McKinley grew to manhood.

HIS EARLY ENVIRONMENT.

Poland is the south-eastern township of the Western Reserve. Until the great development of manufacturing in our own day, the Western Reserve was an offshoot of New England life that was more purely and peculiarly Yankee than Massachusetts or Connecticut. The people were keerly interested in the intellectual, religious and reform movements of the time. The anti-slavery orators frequently visited Poland while McKinley was a boy, and in Poland was supposed to exist a station on the "Underground Railroad," where fugitive slaves from Virginia were concealed and helped along on their way to Canada under cover of the darkness of night. McKinley was eight years old when the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 was passed by Congress, and he remembers well the excitement that prevailed and the meeting held in Poland to which Ben Wade came from his home in Ashtabula county, and which adopted resolutions declaring that come weal, come woe, come stripes, imprisonment, or death," the people of that village would not obey the law, and would continue to give food and shelter to

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the poor slaves fleeing from oppression. Thus young McKinley came in his boyhood under the same influences of agitation against slavery which Garfield felt in his early manhood, and of which Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade were the leaders on the Reserve.

HIS RELIGIOUS MILIEU.

In the forties and the fifties the Reserve was the scene of much sectarian controversy. Each of the old Protestant sects had grave doubts as to the salvation of the other sects. One branch of the Presbyterians thought it wicked to sing anything but psalms in church. The Methodists called their churches meeting-houses and put no steeples on them. They objected to jewelry and to all finery in dress, and denounced dancing and card-playing as devices of the devil. The Baptists would fellowship with no one who had not been dipped in the water. The Dunkards washed each other's feet as a religious rite. Near Poland was a strong community of Germans called Omish, who wore no buttons and fastened their coats and trousers with hooks and eyes and strings for conscience sake. Over all the strife of the warring sects the Quakers exercised a benign influence. At sixteen, William McKinley, junior, joined the Methodist Church, the church of his parents, and he has remained in its communion ever since. He is as tenacious of his religious opinions as of his views on a protective tariff, and here is shown the influence of his strain of Scotch Covenanter blood. To change his belief because of the changes in the currents of modern thought would not be a possibility for him.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION.

The environment of Western Reserve life helped to form the character of the future statesman. I was myself born upon the Reserve, some forty miles from McKinley's Poland home, and I remember vividly the religious controversies, the anti-slavery agitation, the first movement for woman's rights advocated by Lucretia Mott, the numerous temperance revivals, the signing of the pledge as a boy, the debating club at the "Centre," where the farmers wrestled with the questions of the day, the influence of Horace Greeley's Weekly Tribune, great bundles of which came to every country post-office, the ardent desire of the boys and girls for higher education than the district schools afforded, and the wholesome, patient, self-denying life of the farms and villages. This region has produced a long list of men who have made their mark in our national history. The richest man in Poland at that time was not worth ten thousand dollars. A man with five thousand dollars' worth of property and no debts was thought to be well off. Mrs. McKinley helped out the narrow income of the family by taking boarders, and herself did the cooking with the help of her girls. Young McKinley was an ardent student. It was his mother's ambition as well as his own that he should go through college and then study law, but whether this aim could be accomplished was always rather doubtful. The father was frugal, industrious, and self-denying, but he had a large family to provide for and his earnings were small. William did what he could to help out the family income by one sort of work and another in vacation times. At one time it was almost decided that the plan for his education must be abandoned, but his elder sister Annie came to the rescue with the money she had saved as a school teacher. At seventeen he left the seminary so well advanced in his studies that he was able to enter the junior class in Alleghany College, at Meadville, Pa. Illness obliged him to return home during his first

college year, however, and the way was not clear financially for going back, so he taught a country school in a district near Poland the next winter. McKinley was very fond of mathematics, but for Latin he cared little, although he always passed his examinations creditably. In the colleges and academies at that time mathematics, grammar and the dead languages constituted pretty much the whole stock of instruction. He showed no fondness for the debates of the literary societies or the orations of the regular Saturday school exercises, but he was known as a good essay writer.

FOUR YEARS A SOLDIER.

The Civil War put an end to McKinley's plans for In June, 1861, he completing his school education. enlisted at Poland in a company recruited in that village to join the Twenty-third Ohio Regiment of Infantry. He was eighteen at the time-a lad of medium height and muscular build, with straight black hair, gray eyes deep-set under heavy brows, and a heavy chin that indicated a determined character. The Twenty-third

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McKinley

was a good average Ohio regiment of the first year's enlistment, before the bounties were given and drafting began, but it was peculiarly fortunate in its field officers. Its first colonel was William S. Rosecrans, afterward the commander of great armies; its first lieutenant-colonel was Stanley Matthews, afterward a senator and an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and its major was Rutherford B. Hayes, afterward President of the United States. was not long in rising from the ranks to sergeant; and a gallant and thoughtful action at Antietam, in furnishing the men with food and coffee while they were under fire, was brought to the attention of Governor Tod, who sent him a lieutenant's commission. He was a captain before the war closed and was brevetted major. He carried into his military service the seriousness and sense of duty that he had shown in his school life, and he soon gained the friendship of the best officers in the regiment. Long afterward, when he was first a candidate for Governor of Ohio, Ex-President Hayes said of him: Young as he was, we soon found that in business, in executive ability, young McKinley was a man of rare capacity, of unusual and unsurpassed capacity, especially for a boy of his age. When battles were to be fought or service was to be performed in warlike things he always took his place. The night was never too dark; the weather was never too cold; there was no sleet or storm or hail or snow or rain that was in the way of his prompt and efficient performance of every duty." For about two years he was upon Hayes' staff; then he went to the staff of General George Crook, and afterward to the staff of General Carroll. When the war ended he was urged to ask for a commission in one of the new regiments formed for the regular army, but he declined, having no taste for military life as a profession. Mustered out in July, 1865, he gladly returned to Poland, laid aside his uniform, hung up his sword and began the study of law. He valued highly his army experience, however, and still looks back on those four years of campaigning as a more potent educational force than all the years he spent over Latin and mathematics in the seminary.

THE YOUNG LAWYER.

McKinley read law in the office of Charles E. Glidden, of Poland, who was elected judge of the Common Pleas court in 1865. Glidden was a rare man and he exercised a strong and lasting influence upon the character of the young soldier. Judge Glidden had a career of marked success upon the bench, and all the older lawyers in

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eastern Ohio cherish his memory and speak of him as a man who was peculiarly fitted for high judicial duties. McKinley was a hard student. The same tenacity and singleness of purpose which made him successful as a soldier he brought to bear on his law studies. He has never been a man of side issues. few main aims in life he has pursued with a quiet and unswerving directness that has shaped circumstances and compelled fate. He was not a recluse or a bookworm; he found time to mingle in the young society of the village, but the business in hand was to master the principles of the law, and this he never for a moment forgot. After a year and a half with Judge Glidden he managed to get the necessary money to attend a course of lectures at the Albany law school, and in 1867 he was examined and admitted to the bar. Poland was a village of only a few hundred people, and afforded no field for another lawyer. One of the most prosperous of the large towns of the region was Canton, which had then about five thousand inhabitants, was a county seat, and was developing important manufacturing industries. McKinley chose Canton as a promising field for his efforts as a lawyer. In his choice he was influenced largely by a desire to join his elder sister Annie, who was already firmly established in the goodwill and respect of the people of that town as a teacher of unusual merit. Annie McKinley was a woman of unusual capacity. She had excellent judg ment in practical affairs, and in her long career as a teacher in Canton she saved and wisely invested a modest competency. She died in 1890. It was through her influence that the father and mother removed their household from Poland to Canton in 1867. She understood the business advantages of the town, foresaw its growth, and appreciated the social and educational advantages that a young city could offer over the obscure village that had been the home of the family since her childhood.

HOW HE ENTERED POLITICS.

Here the son of the ironmaster found himself, when he hung out his shingle as a lawyer, surrounded by a business public strongly interested in the protective tariff principle, which next to the maintenance of the American Union and the extinction of slavery had been the dominant idea of the Republican party. The county of Stark, however, of which Canton is the capital, was strongly Democratic in its politics. McKinley was an ardent Republican. To him Republicanism meant union, freedom, and progress the cause for which he had fought for four years. If political ambition had been uppermost in his mind at that time he would not have selected Stark county for his home. Nevertheless he was drawn into politics almost as soon as he had his first brief. In the autumn of 1867 there was a hotly contested gubernatorial campaign in Ohio, and a constitutional amendment giving suffrage to coloured men was submitted to the popular vote. The Republicans carried the election, but the amendment was lost. In his canvass McKinley made bis first political speech, and it was in favour of the suffrage amendment. The place was the little village of New Berlin, and the orator, then twenty-four years of age, spoke from the tavern steps to an antagonistic audience. McKinley was at once welcomed by the Republican county leaders as a valuable recruit, and was given numerous appointments in that campaign and in the Presidential campaign of 1868 to speak at town-halls and school-houses throughout the county. By 1869 he had become generally acquainted in the county, and was

well thought of as a rising lawyer and a good political talker of a serious and thoughtful type, and in the latter year the party managers asked him to run for prosecuting attorney, and to undertake what seemed to be the hopeless task of overcoming a strong Democratic majority. He canvassed the county assiduously; his talk was persuasive and not antagonistic; he had courteous, kindly and simple manners that made the country people like him, and to everybody's surprise he was elected. The office of prosecuting attorney is regarded as a great prize by young Ohio lawyers, not for the compensation, which is small, but because it gives them an opportunity to show their mettle in the courts in criminal trials and opens the way to private practice. At twenty-six William

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McKinley, junior, had his feet firmly planted on the first rounds of the ladder of success.

COURTSHIP ACROSS A BANK COUNTER.

In Canton lived the veteran Ohio journalist, John Saxton, who had the distinction of being the journalist of longest continuous service in the whole country west of the Alleghanies. One of his sons, James A. Saxton; became a banker, a capitalist and a man of large and varied business affairs. One of the daughters of the banker was Ida, a girl of many personal charms, a tall blonde, with large, expressive blue eyes, a winning manner and a quick intelligence. She was well educate 1, and after her graduation from Brook Hall Seminary, at Media, Pennsylvania, the father sent her to Europe with her sister to give her a broader view of the world and fit her for the earnest duties of life. It is said that he systematically discouraged the addresses of all young men, and that for the purpose of giving his daughter a serious bent he persuaded her on her return from the

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foreign tour to go into his bank as his assistant. There Ida was installed as cashier. He had won a comfortable fortune, but his theory about girls was that they should be taught a business that would make them independent of marriage and enable them to be self-supporting in case the parents should leave them without sufficient property for their support. Lawyer McKinley had frequent occasions for dropping in at the Saxton bank, and it was not long before Ida's bright eyes, charming manner and intelligent chat had made a complete conquest of his heart. No doubt the same thing happened to other young men in Canton, who transferred their accounts to Saxton's bank that they might have an excuse to meet the pretty cashier, but the ambitious young attorney, whom most of the Canton girls regarded as too serious to be good company, attracted Ida. Banker Saxton soon learned that love is stronger than any theories of life, and he yielded graciously to the inevitable. He thoroughly liked and esteemed McKinley.

MARRIED LIFE.

The marriage was celebrated on January 25th, 1871, in the quaint old Presbyterian church where Ida's parents and grandparents worshipped and where the girl taught a class in the Sunday-school. The young bride was warmly attached to this church, but she immediately transferred her allegiance to the Methodist Church as a proof of her affection for her husband, who had been in the Methodist communion since his sixteenth year.

From Puck.]

The married life of these two young people began under the happiest auspices. Mr. Saxton gave his daughter a pretty house on the best street in the town. McKinley had by this time built up a good law practice, and his income was sufficient to maintain the new home in modest comfort. But in a little time the shadows of great sorrows fell and left ineffaceable marks of suffering on the characters of the loving husband and wife. Two children were born to them, and both were claimed by death before the eldest reached the age of four. The grief of the young mother wrecked her health and left her a victim to a nervous disease which made her a cripple for life, able to walk only with pain and with a supporting arm. The devoted husband saw before him the tragic vision of a childless life and the companionship of an incurable invalid. No man ever accepted such a situation with more cheerful self-abnegation. He made himself the faithful and skilful nurse of his unfortunate wife, and gave every hour he could spare from his work to the task of lightening her sorrows and cheering her broken life. This course he has pursued unfalteringly for more than twenty years, without admitting in his own secret thought that he has been doing anything worthy of praise.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND.

His wife's condition cut him off from most of the social pleasures which men enjoy-the easy-going fellowship of clubs and smoking-rooms, of hunting excursions and pleasure trips, of dinners and receptions; for, once free from his duties as a lawyer or as a Congressman or Governor, he always returned to his wife's side, feeling that she had need of his companionship. When the wife realised the lasting character of her affliction she deter

HE COULDN'T READ. A Pictorial Prophecy for Election Day, November 3rd, 1896.

[July 15, 1896.

mined that she would not allow it to interfere with her husband's public career, and she would have forced herself to be content with a far less measure of care and affection than he has given her, but it was not in his nature to be less devoted. His home tragedy has no doubt intensified the natural gravity of his character, and has given to his face the lines of sternness and asceticism which are noticeable when it is in repose, but it has not in the least soured his disposition. On the contrary, it seems to have imparted additional sweetness and strength.

CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS.

Major McKinley was beaten when he ran a second time for prosecuting attorney of his county, in 1871, and for five years he did not come before the people for any elective office, but he never failed to appear on the stump in a political campaign, and he soon gained recognition as one of the best platform speakers in the State. He was wanted outside of Stark county, and his stumping tours made him known to the people in the other counties of the Eighteenth Congressional district, then made up of the counties of Stark, Columbiana, Mahoning and Carroll. No doubt he had his eye on the House all this time. There has never been anything accidental in his political career, and "trust to luck" was never one of his maxims. He has built up his political influence slowly and solidly, and always by methods that were straightforward and legitimate. In 1876, the year that Hayes was elected

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