of callers, always great, became larger, and every hour was filled with vast responsibilities.

The war came on; the President led in its prosecution. He was constantly in direct telegraphic communication with the front, and the "war room," adjoining his office in the executive mansion, was his first resort in the morning and his last at night. Maps, elaborate in detail, covered the walls of the room; and by means of tiny flags with pins for sticks the positions and changes of position of the ships and land forces of both sides were always before his eyes.

Frequent cabinet meetings and less formal conferences with his immediate advisers, the formulation and consideration of plans, the organization and movement of the army, the extension of the navy and its manipulation-these and many kindred duties engaged his time.

And when the struggle was over, how prompt was his recognition of the loyalty, bravery, and self-sacrifice of our soldiers, our sailors, and our marines! And how ready he has been to accord all praise to the defenders of the national honor in the Philippines, whose duty was nobly done, and who came to feel that their Commander-inChief at Washington was never so busy as to overlook merit or so exacting as to ignore their personality.

With the cessation of hostilities came the problems of peace. The Peace Conference at Paris felt the guiding hand and farseeing Americanism of the President at every stage of its proceedings. With no uncharitableness, he yet insisted upon those things which were the nation's right, and which the verdict of the future will establish as incalculable blessings, not only to our own people, but to the distant peoples who have come under our authority and within the beneficent influence of our free institutions.

THE PHILIPPINES.

Among the opponents of the President's course in the Philippines, none has yet expressed a wish that the battle of Manila Bay had not been fought. In the President's view, the acquisition of the Philippines was the only result of that battle consistent with the American ideal of duty, and with characteristic strength he has done his share in its accomplishment. Some of those who thought the battle could be fought without consequences have, while applauding the victory, decried the outcome; but he has steadfastly pursued the purpose he believed to be right.

It was a magnificent patience that withstood the pressure and temptations of the spring of 1898. The same patient mind dominated our soldiers at Manila in the early days of 1899, and restrained them from resenting the insults of ambitious

Tagals, who had converted themselves into foes. The time was not yet ripe for retaliation; for our legal title extended only to the confines of Manila, and hostilities might require the invasion of territory which we were in honor bound to hold inviolable until the treaty of peace should give us the right to enter. Under orders from President McKinley to avoid a conflict with the Filipinos pending the ratification of the treaty, American honor was sustained; and when military operations became necessary, they were carried on upon our own territory, and not upon that of a defeated foe with whom, under an armistice, we were treating for peace.

The Filipino insurrection is at an end. The work of pacification that remains is only such as during our entire national existence has required the presence of garrisons of soldiers on our frontiers and in other territory acquired in the past. Our title to the territory of the Philippine Islands is undisputed. Shall we relinquish them? To whom? This is a question for Congress; and Congress, fully informed on the subject, has calmly gone home, leaving to the President, for still many months, the duty of maintaining American sovereignty in the Philippines and providing for them a government. That he will do both of these things unflinchingly, all Americans believe, though they do not all agree to the undertaking.

STRENGTH OF THE ADMINISTRATION.

The men who compose the cabinet are strong in their respective departments; all of them strong in many branches of the public service. To the mature experience they brought into the cabinet have been added the trial and the test of great questions and new problems which have come before them for solution. To sustain with such a body of men relations of perfect confidence, so to guide debate, so to encourage the expression of personal opinion, so to invite vigor and individuality, as to make their discussions yield the largest results, is an achievement for any man. But with all this, to dominate their deliberations tactfully, considerately, forcefully, is leadership of the highest order. This has been President McKinley's relation to his cabi

net.

No administration of recent years has dealt with such grave questions as have confronted the present one. The problems which have been crowded into any one of its three years would have made or unmade the fortunes of any administration. But during these busy years the country has taken note of things done, of promises fulfilled, of good faith and fair-dealing. In the excitement of debate, in the fancied necessities

of political strategy, it is easy to state fallacies and natural to exaggerate evils. To the opponent of the President and his administration, the conduct of the War with Spain appears open to severe criticism; to the impartial student of history, it is a record of marvelous preparation and execution. To those opposed to the results secured by the administration in the fields of finance, they presage an unstable currency and disaster to both capital and labor. To the practical, hardheaded, far-sighted business man, who knows confidence to be the bulwark of the financial world, the strengthening of the gold standard, and the enactment into law of the platform promises of the Republican party mean the permanence of public credit, the assurance of increased employment for labor, and the advancement of the country in its material interests. To many

of the opponents of the administration, new possessions mean a weakening of tradition and a departure from right principle. To its adherents, who believe they read aright the nation's destiny in the light of what has come from former expansion, they mean the quickening of national spirit, the extension of free institutions among peoples who have hitherto striven in darkness and doubt, the advancement of the Republic ever higher and higher in its mission of liberty and enlightenment.

M'KINLEY A TYPE.

A great political leader is almost necessarily a type of the nation he leads-the embodiment of the characteristics of his time-the manifest product of the circumstances and conditions of the people he governs and directs. This is more especially true in the critical periods of a nation's history. When a people are profoundly absorbed in events when it is necessary for them to come to conclusions upon vital matters-the man who most nearly represents them in character, rearing, and environment, as well as in thought, is most likely to reach a position of commanding power.

Washington embodied, as did no other of the Revolutionary heroes, the virtues and the limitations of the colonial community to whom fell the task of maintaining for Americans their rights and of constructing a new nation. Lincoln was the type of the frontiersman-the American engaged in conquering the wilderness-of the democracy which spread over the continent from East to West, carrying the idea of God and an eternal Justice, and which struggled too hard for its own life and happiness to be willing that any others should be denied them.

William McKinley is just as much the inevitable product of his time as these two great predecessors in the Presidency. His origin, his profession, his career, his manners, his methods,

his whole personality, and all his achievements, evidence this.

Many

The end of the Civil War marked a sharp change in American life. New national activities, new currents of public thought, new condi tions, have been creating a new type of political leader. President McKinley's unquestioned leadership in economic and financial policies has been followed by as complete and successful leadership in international and diplomatic questions. of those who differ from him most widely do not question that he has dealt with the gravest international matters-those involving the very future of the nation-masterfully, courageously, and consistently. Through the confused conflicts of our political life of the last twenty-five years, the jealousies of eager competition in Congress, the hurly. burly of conventions, along a rough path full of pitfalls, over the obstacles of temporary failure, of inevitable misunderstandings of his purposes and underratings of his abilities, in spite of the alternations of party success, a fit man has survived, and is the President of this nation at a time fraught with grave consequences for the future.

The thirty years from 1830 to 1860 witnessed a conflict for domination between the then radically differing civilizations and ideals of the South and North. The struggle for material well-being was severe, but did not absorb so much the energies and attention of individuals as it has since.

Since the Civil War, no issues with the moral importance of those of the ante-bellum periodslavery and the preservation of the Union-have until recently appeared. Public questions have become more and more of an economic nature. The energies and brains of the American people have been increasingly devoted to commercial and industrial development.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

For the past twenty-five years, President McKinley has been in public life, and has probably met more of his fellow-citizens in that time than any other living American.

The impression of him which a casual caller at the White House receives is that of a sincere, patient, and kindly man of great natural dignity and tact. In his personal contact with others, he is generous of his time in the extreme, and listens to the stories of the unfortunate and complaining with a patience which surprises his associates, when he himself is bearing well-nigh crushing burdens of administrative responsibility. He is naturally sympathetic,, obliging, and selfsacrificing. Yet all this reflects but one side of his character, although it is the side which most impresses those who meet him but casually.

His most predominant characteristics, which bind great bodies of men to him with rivets of steel; which have lifted him from the position of a private soldier to that of Chief Magistrate of the nation, which have sustained him and carried him through the many great crises confronting him, and have given him the trust and confidence of the American people, are his moral strength and his unflinching courage to do the right as he sees it, irrespective of temporary consequences. His natural gentleness and his tendency to ig nore small and non-essential differences, his willingness to oblige even his enemies, and his utter lack of vindictiveness, all these, when the times of crisis have come and the eyes of the people have turned to him alone, have given him added strength to achieve great results in public affairs. At such times he has found that behind him is a multitude of men who believe in the sincerity of his purpose and his unselfishness, and are willing to trust his judgment. These characteristics of moral strength and courage are constantly apparent to those whose connection with the administration of national affairs gives them intimate knowledge of the true relation of the President to public questions. They have been manifest to the people of the United States whenever great issues have placed responsibility upon him. In 1892, when the temporary reaction against the McKinley law brought defeat upon the Republican party, and the law was assailed both from without and within the ranks of the

party, Major McKinley not only made no apology for his convictions, but took occasion, both before and after the election of that year, especially to emphasize his advocacy of the protective. principles embodied in that law.

His words uttered at Columbus, on February 14, 1893, may well be repeated here. He said:

The Republican party values its principles no less in defeat than in victory. It holds to them after a reverse, as before, because it believes in them; and, believing in them, is ready to battle for them. They are not espoused for mere policy, nor to serve in a single contest. They are set deep and strong in the hearts of the party, and are interwoven with its struggles, its life, and its history. Without discouragement, our great party reaffirms its allegiance to Republican doctrine, and with unshaken confidence seeks again the public judgment through public discussion. The defeat of 1892 has not made Republican principles less true, nor our faith in their ultimate triumph less firm.

President McKinley is a lawyer-a member of

the profession which has the best primary equip ment for participation in government, and which necessarily knows the fundamentals of statecraft. He is a lawyer from a small town, where the pecuniary rewards of legal practice are small and uncertain, and where it is unlikely that talent will be early diverted to the service of corpo rations. He is from a community both agricultural and manufacturing, where the effect of financial policies upon industrial development has been well demonstrated. He is from a close and doubtful State, where the consequence of political mistake is sudden defeat and leaders learn caution and wisdom in the hard school of imminent adversity. In a career open to all on an equal footing, among surroundings where arrogance is as fatal as incompetence, he has risen inevitably to leadership by the force and attractiveness of his character and personality.

THE FAME OF PRESIDENTS.

In a country whose social and political systems offer a wide range of opportunity to the individual, some of the greatest possibilities for development and for fame are open to him who has seemingly reached the end of American ambition by attaining to the Chief Magistracy of the nation. The fame of Presidents has been perpetuated or lost according as they have grasped or failed to grasp the American ideal of nationality. It seems hardly necessary now, after the many evidences of this embodied in our history, to assert that this ideal is not always contained in the popular agitation of the day so often a delu

sion that by the morrow has vanished from the public mind.

The

The clear vision to see through an effervescence of feeling to the enduring principle beneath it, and the strength and integrity to act in accordance with such a perception of the real aspirations of the people, make public men great. absence of these traits accounts for the oblivion into which our prominent statesmen so often pass. Whether the fame of William McKinley shall remain a part of our national glory depends not altogether on the present popular estimate of his deeds, which even his contemporaries accord high rank. Another epoch, another generation, will pronounce the final verdict. But three years ago he was one of a number of popular leadersan untried President. To-day his place is fixed by that severest of all tests, the faithful performance of high public duties in a great crisis.

I

It

FIRST met Mr. Bryan in the spring of 1894, and in a few hours I knew him well. was an illustration of how quickly and strongly men are bound together by holding in common an unpopular belief.

The year before, when writing an article for the Political Science Quarterly upon Giffen's Case Against Bimetallism," I had been slowly brought to the belief that

the free coinage of silver, instead of suddenly inflating our currency, would only provide for its gradual and steady expan sion. Having reached this belief, I was naturally drawn 'into sympathy with the men in Congress who advocated it. A few

months later, the

issue came to the front.

In June, 1893, the English Government closed the mints of India to the coinage of silver; and when the prospective scarcity of currency occasioned by this act caused prices all over the world to fall, President Cleveland called Congress together to suspend the coinage of silver here, alleging that the fear of the depreciation of our currency had been the cause of the recent rise in its value for the fall in prices meant nothing else. The speeches that were made when Congress assembled were, for a few days, disappointing to my hopes. Soon, however, one speech was delivered the ability of which was recognized

Copyright, 1899, by Barron Fredricks, N. Y.

even by the hostile press, though the quotations made from it were almost entirely from the peroration-which, like most impassioned perorations, seemed eloquence to those who sympathized with it and gush to those who did not. This speech I carefully studied as soon as it appeared in the Congressional Record, and I found that the eloquent passages quoted in the press dispatches

were almost the only passages in the speech that were not as calmly and closely reasoned as a court decision. It was not only the best Congressional speech I had read on the subject of bimetallism, but it was a stronger argument for bimetallism than I had read in any of the scientific works upon the subject. From that time I regarded Mr. Bryan as the intellectual leader of the Silver forces; and no amount of abuse poured upon him as a mere popular or a tor ever made me think of him as distinctively an orator, except in the sense in which he once defined an orator in a conversation with me. "An orator," he remarked, "is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says." In this sense, Mr. Bryan is an orator; but if oratory is supposed to mean ringing declamation rather than earnest conversation, Mr. Bryan is not an orator one minute in ten.

Holding this view of Mr. Bryan when I was called to Washington in the spring of 1894, I

took pleasure in sending him my card at the door of the House of Representatives. It was the morning that the Coxey procession was about to enter the Capitol grounds, and Mr. Bryan and I stood together on one of the terraces of the Capitol to watch the event. That which surprised me then I have since found to be a fundamental characteristic of the man. I had expected him, as the representative of a Western district, where Populists were a majority among his constituents, to be in sympathy with the Coxey propaganda. But I found that he took no stock in it whatever. The people for whom he stood were the men who were trying to work at their homes, and not the adventurers called together for a theatrical procession; and the method of increasing the currency for which he stood was one which was under the control of the National Government, or which automatically secured a constant expansion upon which business could safely be conducted. He believed in bimetallism, because the indestructibility of the precious metals made it impossible for changes in the production of any single year to greatly affect the amount or value of the accumulations of the past. The free coinage of silver and gold together, he urged, never had inflated the currency faster than the increase of business demanded, and he did not believe they ever would. He was more inclined to believe that the time would come when, in addition to gold and silver, paper money also must be used, in order to make the currency expand as fast as the volume of business, and thus preserve substantial uniformity of prices. His whole position towards the currency was not that of a radical who believed in the dogma, "the more money the more prosperity," but of a conservative who agreed with the classic economists, that the quantity of the currency should be regulated so as to secure business stability as well as business activity.

HOW HE BECAME A BIMETALLIST.

That evening, Mr. Bryan dined with me at my hotel, and after dinner we had a long talk together. In the course of it he had occasion to tell me of the way in which he came to believe in bimetallism. When he was first elected to Congress, he said, he knew practically nothing about. the question; but as his Republican opponent believed in the free coinage of silver, and his own sympathies were with the farmers in their demand for this measure, the issue was never referred to during the campaign. When he reached Washington, he said, he told his wife that he believed the silver issue was going to grow in im. portance; and they two, who had been in college

at the same time, who both had studied law, the wife that she might be with her husband in his work, even though she took no part in it, devoted their leisure during the winter in Washington to studying the silver question together. In speaking of the books which had most profoundly influenced them, he put first. and foremost De Laveleye's "Bimetallism." This book, I happened to know, had not been translated from the French, and the chance remark showed that his reading had not been confined to the English works: But the charm of his story had no relation to the thoroughness of the scholarship which it evinced. It lay entirely in the relation which it showed between himself and his wife. Heine once remarked that a German, even when married, continued to live a bachelor life of the intellect." Mr. Bryan seemed to me to illustrate that in America, more and more man and wife share together the same intellectual life as well as the same social life. In speaking of one of his colleagues who died during that session of Congress, Mr. Bryan said that he found his inspiration at his fireside." This seemed to me to be equally true of Mr. Bryan himself; and the purity of the moral atmosphere about him, together with the strength of his religious faith, both seemed to me counterparts of that love of wife and home which were the most strongly marked features of his private character.

It is not, however, of Mr. Bryan's private character that I wish in this article to speak. That has been frequently enough eulogized; and private character and private devotion to religion have too often been used to turn public attention from the public principles for which statesmen stand. My personal knowledge of the man, however, makes complete my conviction that his whole life was moored in what is best in the life of the American people, and that from instinct, more than from deliberation, he was likely to voice the conscience and the heart of the nation.

THE DEFEAT OF 1894.

Dur

I next met Mr. Bryan in New York, after his party had been so overwhelmingly defeated in the Congressional elections of 1894. This defeat he bore with his customary good-nature. ing the campaign, he said, he had been in the habit of telling a story which was better than it was now. When the Republican speakers had claimed that thousands of discontented Democrats were going to vote the Republican ticket, he had said that they reminded him of the farmer who had asked the restaurant-keeper how much he paid for frog's legs, and when the restaurantkeeper had told him, had asked whether he