University of Virginia Library

XIV
AT THE BANQUET AT CANTON, OHIO, JANUARY
27, 1903, IN HONOR OF THE BIRTHDAY OF
THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY

Mr. Toastmaster, ladies, and gentlemen:

Throughout our history, and indeed throughout history
generally, it has been given to only a very few thrice-favored
men to take so marked a lead in the crises faced
by their several generations that thereafter each stands as
the embodiment of the triumphant effort of his generation.
President McKinley was one of these men.

If during the lifetime of a generation no crisis occurs
sufficient to call out in marked manner the energies of the
strongest leader, then of course the world does not and
cannot know of the existence of such a leader; and in
consequence there are long periods in the history of every
nation during which no man appears who leaves an indelible
mark in history. If, on the other hand, the crisis
is one so many-sided as to call for the development and
exercise of many distinct attributes, it may be that more
than one man will appear in order that the requirements
shall be fully met. In the Revolution and in the period of
constructive statesmanship immediately following it, for
our good fortune it befell us that the highest military and
the highest civic attributes were embodied in Washington,
and so in him we have one of the undying men of
history—a great soldier, if possible an even greater statesman,
and above all a public servant whose lofty and disinterested

patriotism rendered his power and ability—
alike on fought fields and in council chambers—of the
most far-reaching service to the Republic. In the Civil
War the two functions were divided, and Lincoln and
Grant will stand forevermore with their names inscribed
on the honor roll of those who have deserved well of mankind
by saving to humanity a precious heritage. In
similar fashion Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson
stand each as the foremost representative of the great
movement of his generation, and their names symbolize
to us their times and the hopes and aspirations of their
times.

It was given to President McKinley to take the foremost
place in our political life at a time when our country
was brought face to face with problems more momentous
than any whose solution we have ever attempted, save
only in the Revolution and in the Civil War; and it was
under his leadership that the nation solved these mighty
problems aright. Therefore he shall stand in the eyes of
history not merely as the first man of his generation, but
as among the greatest figures in our national life, coming
second only to the men of the two great crises in which
the Union was founded and preserved.

No man could carry through successfully such a task
as President McKinley undertook, unless trained by long
years of effort for its performance. Knowledge of his
fellow-citizens, ability to understand them, keen sympathy
with even their innermost feelings, and yet power
to lead them, together with far-sighted sagacity and resolute
belief both in the people and in their future—all
these were needed in the man who headed the march of
our people during the eventful years from 1896 to 1901.
These were the qualities possessed by McKinley and developed
by him throughout his whole history previous to
assuming the Presidency. As a lad he had the inestimable
privilege of serving, first in the ranks, and then as a

commissioned officer, in the great war for national union,
righteousness, and grandeur; he was one of those whom
a kindly Providence permitted to take part in a struggle
which ennobled every man who fought therein. He who
when little more than a boy had seen the grim steadfastness
which after four years of giant struggle restored the
Union and freed the slave was not thereafter to be daunted
by danger or frightened out of his belief in the great
destiny of our people.

Some years after the war closed McKinley came to
Congress, and rose, during a succession of terms, to
leadership in his party in the lower House. He also became
governor of his native State, Ohio. During this
varied service he received practical training of the kind
most valuable to him when he became Chief Executive
of the nation. To the high faith of his early years was
added the capacity to realize his ideals, to work with his
fellow-men at the same time that he led them.

President McKinley's rise to greatness had in it nothing
of the sudden, nothing of the unexpected or seemingly
accidental. Throughout his long term of service in Congress
there was a steady increase alike in his power of
leadership and in the recognition of that power both by
his associates in public life and by the public itself. Session
after session his influence in the House grew greater;
his party antagonists grew to look upon him with constantly
increasing respect, his party friends with constantly
increasing faith and admiration. Eight years
before he was nominated for President he was already
considered a Presidential possibility. Four years before
he was nominated only his own high sense of honor prevented
his being made a formidable competitor of the
chief upon whom the choice of the convention then
actually fell. In 1896 he was chosen because the great
mass of his party knew him and believed in him and regarded
him as symbolizing their ideals, as representing

their aspirations. In estimating the forces which brought
about his nomination and election I do not undervalue
that devoted personal friendship which he had the faculty
to inspire in so marked a degree among the ablest and
most influential leaders; this leadership was of immense
consequence in bringing about the result; but, after all,
the prime factor was the trust in and devotion to him felt
by the great mass of men who had come to accept him
as their recognized spokesman. In his nomination the
national convention of a great party carried into effect
in good faith the deliberate judgment of that party as to
who its candidate should be.

But even as a candidate President McKinley was far
more than the candidate of a party, and as President he
was in the broadest and fullest sense the President of all
the people of all sections of the country.

His first nomination came to him because of the qualities
he had shown in healthy and open political leadership,
the leadership which by word and deed impresses itself as
a virile force for good upon the people at large and which
has nothing in common with mere intrigue or manipulation.
But in 1896 the issue was fairly joined, chiefly
upon a question which as a party question was entirely
new, so that the old lines of political cleavage were in
large part abandoned. All other issues sank in importance
when compared with the vital need of keeping our
financial system on the high and honorable plane imperatively
demanded by our position as a great civilized
power. As the champion of such a principle President
McKinley received the support not only of his own
party, but of hundreds of thousands of those to whom
he had been politically opposed. He triumphed, and he
made good with scrupulous fidelity the promises upon
which the campaign was won. We were at the time in a
period of great industrial depression, and it was promised
for and on behalf of McKinley that if he were elected

our financial system should not only be preserved unharmed
but improved and our economic system shaped in
accordance with those theories which have always marked
our periods of greatest prosperity.

The promises were kept and following their keeping
came the prosperity which we now enjoy. All that was
foretold concerning the well-being which would follow the
election of McKinley has been justified by the event,
But, as so often happens in our history, the President
was forced to face questions other than those at issue
at the time of his election. Within a year the situation
in Cuba had become literally intolerable. President McKinley
had fought too well in his youth, he knew too
well at first hand what war really was, lightly to enter
into a struggle. He sought by every honorable means
to preserve peace, to avert war. He made every effort
consistent with the national honor to bring about an
amicable settlement of the Cuban difficulty. Then, when
it became evident that these efforts were useless, that
peace could not be honorably entertained, he devoted his
strength to making the war as short and as decisive as
possible. It is needless to tell the result in detail. Suffice
it to say that rarely indeed in history has a contest
so far-reaching in the importance of its outcome been
achieved with such ease. There followed a harder task.
As a result of the war we came into possession of Cuba,
Porto Rico, and the Philippines. In each island the conditions
were such that we had to face problems entirely
new to our national experience, and, moreover, in each
island or group of islands the problems differed radically
from those presented in the others. In Porto Rico the
task was simple. The island could not be independent.
It became in all essentials a part of the Union. It has
been given all the benefits of our economic and financial
system. Its inhabitants have been given the highest
individual liberty, while yet their government has been

kept under the supervision of officials so well chosen that
the island can be appealed to as affording a model for all
such experiments in the future; and this result was
mainly owing to the admirable choice of instruments by
President McKinley when he selected the governing
officials.

In Cuba, where we were pledged to give the island independence,
the pledge was kept not merely in letter but
in spirit. It would have been a betrayal of our duty to
have given Cuba independence out of hand. President
McKinley, with his usual singular sagacity in the choice
of agents, selected in General Leonard Wood the man of
all others best fit to bring the island through its uncertain
period of preparation for independence, and the result of
his wisdom was shown when last May the island became
in name and in fact a free republic, for it started with a
better equipment and under more favorable conditions
than had ever previously been the case with any Spanish-American
commonwealth.

Finally, in the Philippines, the problem was one of
great complexity. There was an insurrectionary party
claiming to represent the people of the islands and putting
forth their claim with a certain speciousness which deceived
no small number of excellent men here at home,
and which afforded to yet others a chance to arouse a
factious party spirit against the President. Of course,
looking back, it is now easy to see that it would have
been both absurd and wicked to abandon the Philippine
Archipelago and let the scores of different tribes—Christian,
Mohammedan, and pagan, in every stage of semicivilization
and Asiatic barbarism—turn the islands into a
welter of bloody savagery, with the absolute certainty
that some strong power would have to step in and take
possession. But though now it is easy enough to see
that our duty was to stay in the islands, to put down
the insurrection by force of arms, and then to establish

freedom-giving civil government, it needed genuine statesmanship
to see this and to act accordingly at the time of
the first revolt. A weaker and less far-sighted man than
President McKinley would have shrunk from a task very
difficult in itself, and certain to furnish occasion for attack
and misrepresentation no less than for honest misunderstanding.
But President McKinley never flinched.
He refused to consider the thought of abandoning our
duty in our new possessions. While sedulously endeavoring
to act with the utmost humanity toward the insurrectionists,
he never faltered in the determination to put
them down by force of arms, alike for the sake of our
own interest and honor, and for the sake of the interest
of the islanders, and particularly of the great numbers of
friendly natives, including those most highly civilized,
for whom abandonment by us would have meant ruin
and death. Again his policy was most amply vindicated.
Peace has come to the islands, together with a greater
measure of individual liberty and self-government than
they have ever before known. All the tasks set us as a
result of the war with Spain have so far been well and
honorably accomplished, and as a result this nation stands
higher than ever before among the nations of mankind.

President McKinley's second campaign was fought
mainly on the issue of approving what he had done in
his first administration, and specifically what he had done
as regards these problems springing out of the war with
Spain. The result was that the popular verdict in his
favor was more overwhelming than it had been before.

No other President in our history has seen high and
honorable effort crowned with more conspicuous personal
success. No other President entered upon his second
term feeling such right to a profound and peaceful satisfaction.
Then by a stroke of horror, so strange in its
fantastic iniquity as to stand unique in the black annals
of crime, he was struck down. The brave, strong, gentle

heart was stilled forever, and word was brought to the
woman who wept that she was to walk thenceforth alone
in the shadow. The hideous infamy of the deed shocked
the nation to its depths, for the man thus struck at was
in a peculiar sense the champion of the plain people, in a
peculiar sense the representative and the exponent of those
ideals which, if we live up to them, will make, as they
have largely made, our country a blessed refuge for all
who strive to do right and to live their lives simply and
well as light is given them. The nation was stunned, and
the people mourned with a sense of bitter bereavement
because they had lost a man whose heart beat for them
as the heart of Lincoln once had beaten. We did right
to mourn; for the loss was ours, not his. He died in the
golden fulness of his triumph. He died victorious in
that highest of all kinds of strife—the strife for an ampler,
juster, and more generous national life. For him the
laurel; but woe for those whom he left behind; woe to
the nation that lost him; and woe to mankind that there
should exist creatures so foul that one among them should
strike at so noble a life!

We are gathered together to-night to recall his memory,
to pay our tribute of respect to the great chief and leader
who fell in the harness, who was stricken down while his
eyes were bright with "the light that tells of triumph
tasted." We can honor him best by the way we show in
actual deed that we have taken to heart the lessons of his
life. We must strive to achieve, each in the measure
that he can, something of the qualities which made President
McKinley a leader of men, a mighty power for good
—his strength, his courage, his courtesy and dignity, his
sense of justice, his ever-present kindliness and regard for
the rights of others. He won greatness by meeting and
solving the issues as they arose—not by shirking them—
meeting them with wisdom, with the exercise of the most
skilful and cautious judgment, but with fearless resolution

when the time of crisis came. He met each crisis on its
own merits; he never sought excuse for shirking a task in
the fact that it was different from the one he had expected
to face. The long public career, which opened
when as a boy he carried a musket in the ranks and closed
when as a man in the prime of his intellectual strength he
stood among the world's chief statesmen, came to what
it was because he treated each triumph as opening the
road to fresh effort, not as an excuse for ceasing from
effort. He undertook mighty tasks. Some of them he
finished completely; others we must finish; and there
remain yet others which he did not have to face, but
which if we are worthy to be the inheritors of his principles
we will in our turn face with the same resolution,
the same sanity, the same unfaltering belief in the greatness
of this country, and unfaltering championship of the
rights of each and all of our people, which marked his
high and splendid career.