CHAPTER XXV.

McKINLEY: BUILDER OF A WORLD POWER.

The traveller standing close at the foot of a mountain can form no idea of its altitude nor of its bulk. He can have no conception of its grandeur, of its majesty, of the myriad beauties which embellish its sides and crown its summit, nor of the limitless riches concealed in its bosom. It is only when time and distance and reflection; when frequent returns and thoughtful visits have set the scene in fair perspective that he appreciates the marvels of the mountain.

The American citizen to-day cannot easily appreciate the full value of William McKinley’s life work. It was not his career as a soldier, his record as a lawyer, his achievements in the halls of Congress; it was not as Governor nor as President that posterity will recognize him at his very greatest, and it was not in either of these capacities that he made his mightiest impress upon the American Republic.

His master work was in giving his country its proper place in the family of the world.

Extravagant eulogy would say he reconstructed the Republic; that he conjured a new nation into life; that he lifted the millions of his countrymen from darkness into light; that he bestowed the grandeur of imperial sunshine upon the humble inhabitants of a neglected land. The extravagant eulogy would not be wholly inaccurate in essence, nor necessarily offensive in terms. And yet the more modest statement more nearly comprehends the essential truth.

He did not recreate the Republic. Practically all the elements here at the end of his life were here at the beginning. He did not conjure up a new nation. The mighty people who followed his bidding in 1898 and so on to the end could never have been conjured from its elements by any force less potential than Omnipotence!

And yet the true American can get a better conception of the dignity of his citizenship; a better estimate of the majesty of national life, a prouder view of world-wide actions upon the theater of the world if he will but patiently and justly consider the steps in the transition which certainly has occurred, and trace the credit through each crisis to the influence most potent in producing that result.

It is believed the work and influence of William McKinley was that most potent force; that, more than any other one man he has led his people from the halls of an heritage of which they were justly proud up to the threshold of an estate immeasurably more magnificent.

Let us begin at the beginning. When he came back from the army he deliberately studied the whole situation. He saw the national condition then existing, judged with astonishing accuracy what would be the salient successive features in its future development, calculated with rare discrimination what treatment would be best in each era, and devoted all his energies to aiding in that progress to the very limit of his ability. He had never a doubt from the first what the end would be. But he did have a more sure foresight of what the future held than had most other Americans then living. One cannot say that he foresaw the time when the Republic should issue its mandate to a monarch of the old world, when it should serve notice of ejectment upon a king; when it should lay the restraining hand upon a mob of emperors and potentates struggling in disgraceful melee for the spoliation of an ancient nation. And yet, standing in the shadow of his funeral flags, with the echoes of knelling bells in the ears, and the memory of that mighty work so late accomplished, one can but see abundant reason for the belief that HE KNEW! How else shall one account for that conduct which admits of explanation on no other ground than that the guiding spirit understood? How else shall one justify the actions which committed him to criticism, which could reflect honor upon him only in the event of this marvelous accomplishment?

It was clear to him that for twenty years after the war the nation would be busy in construction; that the general aim would be to establish productive industries—North and South—that men would be building homes, advancing into new country, opening new mines, reaching farther into the wilderness, reclaiming more and more of the waste land, building more railroads, launching more steamships; and that there would come a period of erecting new homes, of beautifying, of adornment, of polish; and that then would come an era of study toward the conservation of forces, the learning of less expensive ways of doing what had been effectively done before—the era of economizing—to be swiftly followed by the era of stupendous wealth. And let that man who contends the essentials of this picture were not foreseen by William McKinley account on any other basis, if he can, for that statesman’s steadfast progress toward the one result which they alone could produce. Let that man who denies, reflect for a moment that these stages of development—from first to last—were foretold by William McKinley in a thousand speeches. It is not contended that in 1876 he “revealed” to his fellows that war with Spain would come in 1898; nor that he declared in 1880 that “the flag of the free” would wave over lands in the shadows of Asia at the sunrise of a new century. But no man who knows the history of his country and follows well this true story of William McKinley’s life can contend that he did not in 1876 see the imminence of that tariff struggle which culminated in 1880; nor that he failed in 1892 to see the need of a financial reform which 1896 should usher in; or that he underrated in 1898 the mighty consequences of that step which launched his people into a foreign war.

It has been said that he, almost alone of Americans, stood for a protective tariff at the very close of the Civil War. Foreseeing that period of industrial development, he looked at the rolling oceans, and knew each billow would bear on its foamy back a load of goods for American markets; and that each departing ship would heap in its hold the dollars that Americans had paid for those goods. And he knew that, with such a policy, American development could never go beyond the bondman stage; that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” would indefinitely remain mortgaged to the lords of cheaper labor, the host of shrewder men.

So from the first he struggled for a tariff rate which seemed small lessening of the burden that the war had left. Against the superficial charge of injustice he offered the defense of ultimate benefit, and if some of his countrymen were slow to see, let it be said to the credit of a majority that they followed him—not always seeing, but ever trusting until the crisis had passed.

Surely it is no exaggeration to say that William McKinley did more than any other man in America to fix and maintain the policy of protection. It can scarcely be too much to say that, without him, the protective policy would have been overthrown.

If these are conceded, it must follow that the preparation for the newer era, developed from that in which he labored, may be chiefly credited to him.

It was necessary to foster the industries of the United States. Maybe in the following of that policy some selfish persons took a mean and unpatriotic advantage of their countrymen, and claimed a concession they neither needed nor deserved. But in the main the effort was to build up such a wealth as no nation on earth ever before acquired in a similar lapse of time, by peaceful pursuits or the conquests of a victorious war. And if the day came when all that wealth was needed, it may be triumphantly rejoined that the money was here.

Over and over again Mr. McKinley had been assailed with the contention that, while protection would infallibly enrich a certain favored class—the manufacturers—it would as certainly impoverish and keep in poverty the people who must buy their goods. But the issue confounded them. Every class in America shared in the stupendous prosperity which protection insured. Never was labor so largely employed, never had it been so munificently rewarded. Never was the farmer so fortunately situated. Wide as were his fields, he added to them. Bountiful as were his harvests, he found markets for them. Never was the mechanic so much in demand. Never was the artisan so much sought after. And—as the flight of time brought the inevitable desire for refinement—never was there such a compensation for the artist, or the writer, the singer or the sculptor. The overflowing coffers of the country enriched all the countrymen who deserved.

Then came the pause when a nation, rising to the stature of maturity, looked over the mountain boundary, looked over the ocean wall, and felt the unformed impulse to share in the affairs of the world. It was so natural, as inevitable, as that the youth of health and strength should feel the stirring of desire to mingle with his kind. It is not scorn of home. It is not contempt for the precious past. But it is obedience to a law which Abram heard away there in Ur, of the Chaldees, and obeyed in his western pilgrimage. It is the process of growth which the Creator meant all mankind should feel.

At the doors of the continent lay the island of Cuba. From time before the Republic was founded, that island had been the spoil of the Spaniards. There was not a day since Ovando landed that did not see the Cubans cruelly treated by the Don. How they ever throve under a domination so severe is one of the mysteries. The Ruler of all the Earth must have raised up that people and preserved it through awful adversity for a purpose neither its leaders nor their task masters could foresee.

But the tax collector was there. The Castilian despoiler was there. The hand of the oppressor was laid heavily upon the Cubans, and they died at the edge of the sword through two hundred years of tyranny.

And in that day when the American Republic had attained its growth, had reached its manhood, there was a protest against a continuance of cruelty. The Republic demanded that the Don cease from troubling; that the Cubans be rescued.

President McKinley waited until the united voice of his countrymen convinced him that they had surely arrived at years of national discretion, and that their challenge was not the utterance of a passionate mood but the expression of an unalterable determination. And then he issued his order to Spain:

“Leave the West Indies forever!”

There was reason in the demand. Cuba lay so close to our shores that her continual suffering, the outrages perpetrated upon her people, became a scandal in the eyes of the Republic. It was like a strong man standing unmoved while a child is being beaten by a bully.

Besides, one consequence of such rule as the Spaniards maintained was a perilous sanitary condition in the cities that traded continually with the ports of the States. American cities had learned the rules of health, and had banished yellow fever and the cholera. But what profit in that provision if a ship sailed across the narrow sea and spread the plague upon our shores? There was reason in self defense for the notice to quit.

That fundamental principle of the nation called the “Monroe doctrine” forbade any power in the old world from extending its rule in the new. It is but a logical sequence of that system that an old world power which cannot in two hundred years complete its subjugation of a new world people has never had a right it could maintain here; that no king from Europe had title to soil in the Western hemisphere if he could not perfect that title in that lapse of time. And as a policy of the nation and the interest of the nation joined in dictating the action, the Spaniards were commanded to retire. The time had come when President McKinley could make his case good even in the courts of old-world kings. And there was not a murmur of protest from a palace abroad when Madrid received that portentous command.

But there was another reason—another consideration which men too often overlook, yet which was of the most stupendous value to the Republic. War with a foreign power would reunite a country divided by civil strife, and stubbornly, ill-temperedly refusing to perfect its peace.

It was probably admitted that the passions following the rebellion and particularly provoked by the assassination of President Lincoln, served as warrant for a severity in dealing with the Southern States which was far beyond the boundaries of justice. There was a Draconian rigidity about the laws which the losers were compelled to obey; a perhaps needless austerity in impressing the fact of conquest. Sectional passions were aroused, sectional jealousies and animosities were inflamed until unthinking men both North and South had achieved the bad success of creating a religion of hate. In the years when Major McKinley was acting the citizen-soldier part—putting away his sword and devoting himself to the activities of peace—many less patriotic and wise than he were teaching their children to hate the South. As the Swiss youth imbibed hatred of Austria with their mother’s milk, so these children in the North were filled with a bitter rage against the children who sat in the Southland, under the shadow of the stars and stripes. And the generation grew up in that enmity for brothers in the Republic, and many men profited by making the propagation of strife their one profession—the division of their country their one occupation. The poets say that love begets love. It is certainly as true that hatred begets hate. And if the youth of the North approached public questions always with the poison of sectional prejudice rankling in their hearts and warping their judgments, be sure the people of the South most cordially reciprocated. To thousands above the Ohio river, the states below that stream were still “rebel.” To thousands below the people of the North were brutal and murderous invaders.

Through all the period when the nation was gathering material strength the effort of wise men was to heal that hurt, to reunite the nation, to erase forever that bitter dividing sectional line. But they could not succeed. Throughout Major McKinley’s public speeches, dating from that first debate, when he was scarcely out of uniform, clear to the end of his career, one finds to-day no word of anger against the South; one finds unnumbered expressions of fraternal love and good will.

Others followed his example, and swelled the rising chorus of a newer Union. But it was from 1865 to 1898, a mere mockery. The fabric of fraternity was but a gossamer web. The bridge that spanned the chasm was a network of fancy, and men knew they could not cross. The very brotherhood in which men from the two sections met in public and private life was the sheerest superficiality, and each was ready to fly to arms at a moment’s notice.

What, above all things, was needed as an absolute condition precedent to national advance? Why, national unity! And no man had been able to effect it. But when William McKinley heard that rising demand for stern measures with Spain, he heard as well the pledge of a new and everlasting bond of union.

So that the war with Spain was not merely the checking of a bully, the act of a humane power, the safeguarding of cities from the descent of the plague, the assuring of security to Americans resident in Cuba and the protection to American trade with that island. It was, as well, the master magic which could banish strife at home; it was the building of a Vulcan forge to weld beyond the power of breaking the one bond “from the lakes to the gulf.” For the first stroke at Americans by Spaniards was a challenge that was answered by indignant manhood in every state from the everglades of Florida to the snow-crowned heights of Mount Tacoma. And OUR NATION sprang to arms!

Sometimes there is internal strife in your family, in your circle of friends, in your party. That is a wise father who can deftly devise a situation which compels his household to make common cause. That is a shrewd citizen who can rally his friends by a stroke which menaces all of them. That politician is skillful who can swiftly sweep away dissension by a turn which menaces the whole organization. And that was a wise President who saw behind the rising war cloud the rainbow of a hope which nothing else could reveal.

There was no need for them to blow up the Maine. Without that dastardly act, there would inevitably have come a change. Spanish oppression in Cuba would have ceased. The reforms demanded by the Republic would have been accomplished—every one. But, it would have been by the action of Spain, and without inflicting upon that nation the expense, the humiliation and the disaster of a war. Possibly, too, had those reforms been made, had the conscience and humanity of Americans been satisfied without striking a blow, the abolishing of the sectional line would not have occurred.

But it is needless to speculate on what might have occurred. What did occur is known. It was definite. At the moment when Spain, had she rightly appreciated the situation, should have borne herself with all dignity and honor, the blow which hurled down her house was struck. In the middle of the night the darkness was rifted with a lance of flame, the world was rocked with the shock of explosion, and a battleship, on an errand of peace and courtesy, was crushed in the grip of a submarine mine—and all over the still surface of the starlit bay floated the mangled corpses of the slain. The darkest deed since St. Bartholomew night, the most savage act since Calcutta’s Black Hole had stained the page of history, and Christian civilization had seen a Christian nation sound the deepest deep of infamy.

That bursting mine jolted the molecules of mankind into a new combination, and the Republic became a Union indeed. After all, blood is thicker than water; and he who uttered that—

“—bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony—”

was an American. Of course America was roused.

The story of the War with Spain has been well told. But it fails to impress its moral if you miss the master hand of President McKinley in fixing forever the unity of the Union. He appointed to the command of American soldiers those who had commanded with ability, either North or South, in the Civil War. And they proved his sagacity, for—without exception—they quit them like men. They were strong. The flag of Washington at Valley Forge, of Gates at Yorktown, of Jackson at New Orleans, of Perry on Lake Erie, of Lawrence, and Fremont, and Grant was the one banner about which they rallied. They won the war. And they brought no honor to either North or South—but brought it all HOME.

This cannot well be overestimated. The time had come when the Republic must advance from the formative stage to the stature of a power of the world. It could not do so divided. Through the skillful use of possibilities placed in his hands by the war, President McKinley at a stroke, and within a week from that night in February when Havana harbor heaved with the heaving of a treacherous stroke, made his people one.

Then they were ready!

Swiftly came the knocking of Hawaii for admission to the national fold. It needed no war. No cannon, no circling sword or plunging bayonet was in demand. The thousands of lives sought citizenship in the Republic, and the material millions offered themselves for the nation’s enrichment. And in a day the United States of America held half the ocean as its own.

No need of recapitulating. The Ladrones, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, an empire wider than Ferdinand knew, a region richer in wealth and more pregnant with possibility than Carthage conquered, was added to the Republic in a year. The nation which had insisted on a home market, had taken command of the markets of the world. The nation which had only insisted that no foreign power interfere on this side the Atlantic, stretched the arm of might and the word of command into the camps of kings—and secured obedience.

Nothing that occurred in the United States could in any way have produced the events which took place in China. The Boxer rebellion was a local event, due solely to conditions existing there. American interests—of merchant and missionary, of ambassador and traveller, of scientist and scholar—were all affected by those massacres which amazed the world. Imagine, if you will, what would have been the result had the Republic been in 1900 what it was in 1890. Then we had no army in the Philippines. The nations of Europe, hurrying in response to that cry for help from the hundreds in the legation, had small thought of America. Well, American merchants had been massacred, American property destroyed, American missions burned and American consuls assailed. But to the European of 1890 there would not have been a suggestion of America appearing on the scene with force of arms.

But the America of 1900 providentially had a force at hand. The fact had already been established that the Republic was a world power, and must be considered as such. And when General Chaffee marched from Tien Tsin to Pekin, he was not regarded as an intruder. He was not looked upon with cold superciliousness. The king’s men knew there was no place on the face of the earth where the Republic might not appear. They knew it had the right to appear at any point where its interests were menaced, or where honor called. And they knew it had the power to go, to do, and to return with laurels.

Perhaps the Republic’s influence over the king’s men at Pekin was the greatest evidence of President McKinley’s masterly administration. That influence checked the looting. It preserved native rights. It assisted in a just retribution, and then stayed the mailed fist of unchristian vengeance. It prevented the partition of China, and insured the integrity of that ancient empire. And it loomed before the world as a nation strong enough to take care of itself at home or abroad, and wise enough to be just. It was an exhibition that did more for the good fame of the Republic than any other act imaginable.

And not a detail of it could have happened had not the army been in Luzon. Not a detail could have happened in 1890!

It is not easy for a little man to change his mind. The small man must be “consistent,” because he can see nothing but small things; because he can not appreciate the changes which inevitably come in the world. But the world does change; and he who tries to make the clothes of yesterday fit the occasion of to-day makes utter failure. Not many men who followed Major McKinley, the protectionist, could easily grasp the purpose of President McKinley, the supporter of the gold standard. Not all who indorsed him in his financial policy could appreciate the swift changes which succeeded each other in the world policies from 1898 to 1901. Yet each was necessary in its place, and if the President had failed to grasp the situation, if he had failed to take at its flood that tide in the affairs of nations, the Republic that mourns him to-day would be but a hermit Union, refusing to employ its majestic powers and of no more consideration in the assembly of nations than is the navy of Switzerland in a marine exhibition.

No year ever brought swifter development to a people than did 1898 to the United States of America. Questions of military policy and questions of statesmanship, matters of immediate expediency and matters that looked to the future—all these crowded the hurrying hours of that most immemorial year. It is not curious that even the President was outrun by the speeding conditions. When Porto Rico became a part of the United States it was asked: “Shall her products come in free at the ports of the mainland?” And President McKinley, pressed upon by a multitude of duties, occupied with a myriad cares, filling his days and his nights with most careful watching of details that had multiplied in a twelvemonth, said: “It is our plain duty to give free trade to Porto Rico.” And the word was heralded to the ends of the earth. Then came the practical. If that sound theory should be enforced in actual commerce, a disturbance would arise which would prove lamentable. It were better to preserve the forms of a tariff until such time as revenues of the island would support the government of the island, giving back, meanwhile, every dollar derived from the Porto Ricans by that tariff. The changing conditions had made that the wiser plan.

President McKinley led his fellow countrymen through the changes of the passing years, guiding them always in the way most wise for that peculiar time, and turning to new methods when the new occasion demanded. And in the end we see the magnificent structure which his planning and his labors have perfected. We see the very greatest nation on earth, made great by protection; we see the richest nation, made rich with a sound money; we see the strongest nation, made strong by an actual union; and we see the most potent and influential nation on earth, made so by the foreign policy of William McKinley. Remember—

“For I doubt not through the ages One increasing purpose runs; And the thoughts of men are widening With the process of the suns.”