Chapter VIII: Part 8

Therefore I ask you to-night to look at the results of the policies championed by President McKinley on both the occasions when he appealed to the people for their suffrages, and to see how well that appeal has been justified by the event. Most certainly I do not claim all the good that has befallen us during the past six years as due solely to any human policy. No legislation, however wise, no Administration, however efficient, can secure prosperity to a people or greatness to a nation. All that can be done by the law-maker and the administrator is to give the best chance possible for the people of the country themselves to show the stuff that is in them. President McKinley was elected in 1896 on the specific pledge that he would keep the financial honor of the Nation untarnished and would put our economic system on a stable basis, so that our people might be given a chance to secure the return of prosperity. Both pledges have been so well kept that, as is but too often the case, men are beginning to forget how much the keeping of them has meant. When people have become very prosperous they tend to become sluggishly indifferent to the continuation of the policies that brought about their prosperity. At such times as these it is of course a mere law of nature that some men prosper more than others, and too often those who prosper less, in their jealousy of their more fortunate brethren, forget that all have prospered somewhat. I ask you soberly to remember that the complaint made at the present day of our industrial or economic conditions never takes the form of stating that any of our people are less well off than they were seven or eight years back, before President McKinley came in and his policies had a chance to be applied; but that the complaint is that some people have received more than their share of the good things of the world. There was no such complaint eight years ago, in the summer of 1894. Complaint was not then that any one had prospered too much; it was that no one had prospered enough. Let each one of us think of the affairs of his own household and his own business, let each of us compare his standing now with his standing eight years back, and then let him answer for himself whether it is not true that the policies for which William McKinley stood in 1896 have justified themselves thrice over by the results they have brought about.

In 1900 the issues were in part the same, but new ones had been added. Prosperity had returned; the gold standard was assured; our tariff was remodeled on the lines that have marked it at all periods when our well-being was greatest. But as must often happen, the President elected on certain issues was obliged to face others entirely unforeseen. Rarely indeed have our greatest men made issues—they have shown their greatness by meeting them as they arose. President McKinley faced the problems of the Spanish War and those that followed it exactly as he had faced the problems of our economic and financial needs. As a sequel to the war with Spain we found ourselves in possession of the Philippines under circumstances which rendered it necessary to subdue a formidable insurrection which made it impossible for us with honor or with regard to the welfare of the island to withdraw therefrom. The occasion was seized by the opponents of the President for trying to raise a new issue, on which they hoped they might be more successful than on the old. The clamor raised against him was joined in not only by many honest men who were led astray by a mistaken view or imperfect knowledge of the facts, but by all who feared effort, who shrank from the rough work of endeavor. The campaign of 1900 had to be fought largely upon the new issue thus raised. President McKinley met it squarely. Two years and eight months ago, before his second nomination, he spoke as follows:

“We believe that the century of free government which the American people have enjoyed has not rendered them irresolute and faithless, but has fitted them for the great task of lifting up and assisting to better conditions and larger liberty those distant peoples who through the issue of battle have become our wards. Let us fear not. There is no occasion for faint hearts, no excuse for regrets. Nations do not grow in strength, the cause of liberty and law is not advanced by the doing of easy things. The harder the task the greater will be the result, the benefit, and the honor. To doubt our power to accomplish it is to lose faith in the soundness and strength of our popular institutions.... We have the new care and can not shift it. And, breaking up the camp of ease and isolation, let us bravely and hopefully and soberly continue the march of faithful service, and falter not until the work is done.... The burden is our opportunity. The opportunity is greater than the burden.”

There spoke the man who preached the gospel of hope as well as the gospel of duty, and on the issue thus fairly drawn between those who said we would do our new work well and triumphantly and those who said we would fail lamentably in the effort, the contest was joined. We won. And now I ask you, two years after the victory, to look across the seas and judge for yourselves whether or not the promise has been kept. The prophets of disaster have seen their predictions so completely falsified by the event that it is actually difficult to arouse even a passing interest in their failure. To answer them now, to review their attack on our army, is of merely academic interest. They played their brief part of obstruction and clamor; they said their say; and the current of our life went over them and they sank under it as did their predecessors who, thirty-six years before, had declared that another and greater war was a failure, that another and greater struggle for true liberty was only a contest for subjugation in which the United States could never succeed. The insurrection among the Filipinos has been absolutely quelled. The war has been brought to an end sooner than even the most sanguine of us dared to hope. The world has not in recent years seen any military task done with more soldierly energy and ability; and done, moreover, in a spirit of great humanity. The strain on the army was terrible, for the conditions of climate and soil made their work harassing to an extraordinary degree, and the foes in the field were treacherous and cruel, not merely toward our men, but toward the great multitude of peaceful islanders who welcomed our rule. Under the strain of wellnigh intolerable provocation there were shameful instances, as must happen in all wars, where the soldiers forgot themselves, and retaliated evil for evil. There were one hundred thousand of our men in the Philippines, a hundred thousand hired for a small sum a month apiece, put there under conditions that strained their nerves to the breaking point, and some of the hundred thousand did what they ought not to have done. But out of a hundred thousand men at home, have all been faultless? Every effort has been made to detect such cases, to punish the offenders, and to prevent any recurrence of the deed. It is a cruel injustice to the gallant men who fought so well in the Philippines not to recognize that these instances were exceptional, and that the American troops who served in the far-off tropic islands deserve praise the same in kind that has always been given to those who have well and valiantly fought for the honor of our common flag and common country. The work of civil administration has kept pace with the work of military administration, and when on July 4 last amnesty and peace were declared throughout the islands the civil government assumed the complete control. Peace and order now prevail and a greater measure of prosperity and of happiness than the Filipinos have ever hitherto known in all their dark and checkered history; and each one of them has a greater measure of liberty, a greater chance of happiness, and greater safety for his life and property than he or his forefathers have ever before known.

Thus we have met each task that has confronted us during the past six years. Thus we have kept every promise made in 1896 and 1900. We have a right to be proud of the memories of the last six years. But we must remember that each victory only opens the chance for a new struggle; that the remembrance of triumphs achieved in the past is of use chiefly if it spurs us to fresh effort in the present. No nation has ever prospered as we are prospering now, and we must see to it that by our own folly we do not mar this prosperity. Yet we must see to it also that wherever wrong flourishes it be repressed. It is not the habit of our people to shirk issues, but squarely to face them. It is not the habit of our people to treat a good record in the past as anything but a reason for expecting an even better record in the present; and no Administration, gentlemen, should ask to be judged save on those lines. The tremendous growth of our industrialism has brought to the front many problems with which we must deal; and I trust that we shall deal with them along the lines indicated in speech and in action by that profound jurist and upright and fearless public servant who represents Pennsylvania in the Cabinet—Attorney-General Knox. The question of the so-called trusts is but one of the questions we must meet in connection with our industrial system. There are many of them and they are serious; but they can and will be met. Time may be needed for making the solution perfect; but it is idle to tell this people that we have not the power to solve such a problem as that of exercising adequate supervision over the great industrial combinations of to-day. We have the power and we shall find out the way. We shall not act hastily or recklessly; but we have firmly made up our minds that a solution, and a right solution, shall be found, and found it will be.

No nation as great as ours can expect to escape the penalty of greatness, for greatness does not come without trouble and labor. There are problems ahead of us at home and problems abroad, because such problems are incident to the working out of a great national career. We do not shrink from them. Scant is our patience with those who preach the gospel of craven weakness. No nation under the sun ever yet played a part worth playing if it feared its fate overmuch—if it did not have the courage to be great. We of America, we, the sons of a nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the teachings of distrust, spurn the creed of failure and despair. We know that the future is ours if we have in us the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new century girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing in the struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the Nation’s future shall even surpass her glorious past.

AT THE BANQUET TO JUSTICE HARLAN, THE NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 9, 1902

_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:

It is a peculiar privilege to be here to-night as one of those gathered to do homage to a career which has honored America. It is difficult to say certain of the truths which must need be said without being guilty of truisms in saying them. It is not an idle boast of this country when we speak of the court upon which Mr. Justice Harlan sits as the most illustrious and important court in all the civilized world. It is not merely our own people who say that—it is the verdict of other nations as well.

Mr. Justice Harlan has served for a quarter of a century on that court. During that time he has exercised an influence over the judicial statesmanship of the country of a kind such as is possible only under our own form of government. For the judges of the Supreme Court of the land must be not only great jurists, but they must be great constructive statesmen. And the truth of what I say is illustrated by every study of American statesmanship, for in not one serious study of American political life will it be possible to omit the immense part played by the Supreme Court in the creation, not merely the modification, of the great policies through and by means of which the country has moved on to its present position.

Thrice fortunate is the court when it has as one of its members a man who has played a great part in other spheres of our composite national life. Mr. Justice Harlan came from Kentucky, a State in which the patriotism of the people was put to so peculiarly a severe test in the Civil War. In the States of the further North it was easy for the man to make up his mind on which side he would unsheathe his sword. In the States of the further South it was equally easy. In Kentucky the task was a difficult one. I remember, Mr. Justice, being told by a Kentuckian, who was a stanch friend of yours and one of the greatest lawyers and most patriotic citizens whom this country had—John Mason Brown—that he came back from a trip from the West as a young man of twenty-one, just at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, just after Sumter had been fired upon, and his mother brought down to him the sword that his father had carried in the Mexican War, and said to him:

“My son, this is the sword your father carried. I hope you will draw it on the side that defends the flag for which your father fought, but, for one side or the other, draw it you must.”

In any audience in any State of the Union, take it as far north as you wish, I can appeal with confidence to the people I address when I say that next to the homage we pay to the men who proved the truth of their endeavor as they battled in the blue uniform is the homage we pay to the men who, with equal sincerity, with equal devotion to the right as it was given them to see the right, wore the gray. And none pay that tribute of regard so frankly as those who themselves wore the blue in battle.

And having said that, I am sure that none of my friends who fought in the Confederate service will misunderstand me or will grudge what I am about to say when I say that the greatest debt owed by this country to any set of men is owed by it to those men of the so-called border States—the men who in statesmanship followed Clay and the Crittendens and the Blairs; the men who as soldiers fought on the same side with Thomas and Farragut, the men who were for the Union, without regard to whether their immediate associates were for it or not. In New York, in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Iowa, the men who stood for the Union went with the stream. In parts of Kentucky, of Virginia, of Missouri, they stemmed the torrent. And, gentlemen, I am half a Southerner myself. Two of my uncles fought in the Confederate Navy. One of them served under the father-in-law of Vice-Governor Luke Wright, of the Philippine Islands. And so I think I have the right to say that, knowing the Southern people as I do, I would heartily advocate fighting twice as hard as you fought from 1861 to 1865 for the privilege of staying in the same Union with them.

The man to be a great statesman on the bench of the Supreme Court must have many qualities, and fortunate are we that this evening we can point to Justice Harlan as embodying them. A good citizen must be a good citizen in peace and in war. He must have the decent and orderly virtues, and he must have the essential manliness for the lack of which no good intention can atone. It will be a bad thing for the nation if ever we grow as a nation to submit to the suppression of efficiency and morality, if we ever grow to accept the belief that we are to have two camps, in one of which will be grouped the men who mean well, but who don’t do things, and in the other the men who do things, but who do not mean well.

The art of successful self-government is not an easy art for people or for individuals. It comes to our people here as the inheritance of ages of effort. It can be thrown away; it can be unlearned very easily, and it surely will be unlearned if we forget the vital need not merely of preaching, but of practicing both sets of virtues—if we forget the vital need of having the average citizen not only a good man, but a man.

It is a fine thing to have on the Supreme Court a man who dared venture all for the great prize of death in battle when the country called for him, and a man who, after the war was closed, did not content himself with living an ignoble life on the plea that he had done so well it was not necessary to do more, but who continued to do his duty as a citizen all the better because he had done it as a soldier; the man who remembered that duty done, to be of practical use, must serve not as an excuse for not doing further duty, but as an incentive, as a spur, to make him feel ashamed that his present or his future should fall short of his past.

So, Judge Harlan, I greet you personally, sir. I wish to express my own personal debt to you for your influence, for your example, but I wish far more, speaking as the representative of all our people, to express the infinite sense of obligation we have to you for having shown by your life what the type of fearless American citizenship should be.

RECEPTION OF A DELEGATION FROM THE NATIONAL BOARD OF TRADE, WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 15, 1903

Mr. Randall, speaking for the delegation, said: Mr. President, we have come here merely to present ourselves and to make our annual call on the President of the United States. We thank you for meeting us.

The President responded: I shall not try to make you any speech. I wish simply to say what a very real pleasure it is to see you, and also to say this—that I am glad to see the meetings of the big business interests take place sometimes in Washington. Nothing can be better both for the business interests and for legislation than to have as close a touch as possible between the elective representatives here and the men whose welfare is so interwoven with what is done in the halls of Congress. It is a very great help to all of us to have you come here. I thank you for coming.

AT THE BANQUET OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 19, 1903

_Mr. Chairman, Gentlemen_:

It is no accident that we should meet here to celebrate a record of fifty years—that period which covers the half century which has seen the gigantic industrial change of the world, which has seen the fruition of the forces that have brought about a revolution, socially and industrially, within the fifty years such as was hardly seen within any preceding five centuries. Life has been very intense, has been carried on at a very high pressure, during that half century; more intense, carried on at a higher pressure, than ever before. That means of course that all the forces have been raised to a higher degree of power—the forces of evil, and, thank heaven, also the forces of good. If it had not been for the work of such organizations as this, for such organized effort as that represented by you here to-night, the immense material progress of the world during the past half century would have been a progress that would have told for ill for the nations, not for good. We can say with truth that we are better off than we were. We can say that the creed of those who have faith is the right creed as justified in present history, because side by side with this great material development, and with an even stronger rate of growth than the forces of evil, have grown the forces of good. If it had not been for the work done by those who founded this movement, and of course by all those who have taken part in similar movements, in all movements for good, in every movement for social betterment, for civic betterment, in every movement to make men decent and manly and strong—if it had not been for the work done by them, if they had sat supine and thought things would make themselves better, things would have become steadily worse. We see all around us people who say, “Oh, well, things will come out all right.” So they will; but not because there are men who are content to _say_ that they will come out all right; but because there is a sufficient number of earnest men with the root of righteousness in them who are bound to _do_ what will make them come out right.

The remarkable concentration of our lives during the last half century has rendered it possible for anything that is evil to manifest itself more strongly than ever before, and therefore made it necessary for us to see that the good has a corresponding development. A hundred years ago there was no such need for the Young Men’s Christian Associations, for the invaluable Young Women’s Christian Associations. Life was simpler. The temptation would come surely to every man, but it would not come so frequently and in so intense a form. As the forces of evil manifested themselves in stronger and stronger form they had to be met, if they were to be successfully grappled with, by organized effort, by the effort of the many, which must always be stronger than the effort of one; and the successful effort to combat the forces of evil had to take just such shape as has been given to the growth of the Young Men’s Christian Associations. It had to take the shape of combining decency and efficiency. There are many things that are so true that it seems almost trite to speak of them, and yet it is continually necessary to speak of them. There have been philanthropic movements led and supported by most excellent people, which, nevertheless, have produced results altogether incommensurable with the efforts spent, because they failed to combine as this movement has combined a recognition of the needs of human nature with a resolute effort to make that human nature better.

I have been acquainted especially with three types of your work: the work in the army and navy, the work among railroad men, and the work among college students. These three classes are not going to be effectively reached as classes by any effort which fails to take account of the fact that they demand manliness as well as virtue; and you can make them straight only on condition that in making them straight you also keep in mind that it is necessary for them to be strong. Remember Wesley’s remark when some one criticised him because his hymn tunes were so good. He answered that he was not going to leave all the good tunes to the devil. We want to be exceedingly careful that the impression shall not get about that good men intend to leave strength to those who serve the devil. I was very much interested in what was said by Mr. Mott as to the meeting at Yale a few nights ago, where the captain of the football team and the captain of the crew of next season both were present. I think that is typical of the whole movement. I am certain that those who have had experience in the army and navy have seen that in the long run the man who is a decent man is apt to be the man who is the best soldier. The work among the railroad men always particularly appealed to me because the railroad men are those who follow that modern industry which more than any other modern industry makes demand upon its followers for the heroic virtues, for the willingness to take risks, the willingness to accept responsibilities, the readiness to adopt a standard of duty which will require at need the sacrifice of life; those who follow it must possess both the power to obey and the power to act on individual initiative—the power to take responsibility. You can make men like that accept morality if you can make them understand that it is not only compatible with but is demanded by essential manliness. The work of the Y. M. C. A. has grown so among college students, for instance, because (I think I am right in saying) it has tried, not to dwarf any of the impulses of the young, vigorous men but to guide them aright. It has sought not to make a man’s development one-sided, not to prevent his being a man, but to see that he is in the fullest sense a man, and a good man. We greet to-night with peculiar pleasure the men who served in the great war. Those men won in the day of trial because they and their fellows had in them, in the first place, the power of devotion to an ideal, and, in the next place, the strength to realize that power in effective fashion. If the men of ’61 had not been driven forward by a spirit which made them anxious to lay down their lives if need should be rather than to see the flag of the Union torn in twain, if they had not had in them the lift toward loftier things which comes to those who value life as of small account compared to devotion to country and to the flag, if they had not in the truest and greatest and deepest sense of the word been patriotic, then no amount of fighting capacity would have saved them. I don’t care how good natural soldiers or sailors they had been, if their ambitions had been personal, if they had been fundamentally disloyal, if each had been striving to build up himself and had viewed his fellows as rivals to be trampled down for his own advantage, then failure would have come upon them. If Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Farragut had not all felt that they were fighting for one end, that they were holding up the arms of mighty Lincoln as he toiled and wrought and suffered for the people, then their prowess would have availed naught, and this Nation would have gone down into bloody anarchy, would have crumbled into dust as so many republics had crumbled of old. They needed fervent devotion to country, devotion to the right, and power to fight.

In addition to the lofty ideal—in no way as a substitute for it, but in addition to this power of devotion to an ideal—the man must have the fibre of heart, the fibre of body, to make his devotion take effective shape for the Nation’s welfare. And nowadays we shall win out, in the fight for a loftier life—we shall make this twentieth century better and not worse than any century that has gone before it—in proportion as we approach the problems that face us as this society has approached those problems, with a firm resolution to neglect neither side of the development of our people, to strive to make the young men decent, God-fearing, law-abiding, honor-loving, justice-doing; and also fearless and strong, able to hold their own in the hurly-burly of the world’s work, able to strive mightily that the forces of right may be in the end triumphant.

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 can not 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 for evermore 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 slaves 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 this 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 whom 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 semi-civilization 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.

AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., FEBRUARY 26, 1903, UPON THE OCCASION OF THE BI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTH OF JOHN WESLEY

_Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen_:

I am glad to have the chance of addressing this representative body of the great Church which Wesley founded, on the occasion of the commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. America, moreover, has a peculiar proprietary claim on Wesley’s memory, for it is on our continent that the Methodist Church has received its greatest development. In the days of our Colonial life Methodism was not on the whole a great factor in the religious and social life of the people. The Congregationalists were supreme throughout most of New England; the Episcopalians on the seaboard from New York southward; while the Presbyterian congregations were most numerous along what was then the entire Western frontier; and the Quaker, Catholic, and Dutch Reformed Churches each had developments in special places. The great growth of the Methodist Church, like the great growth of the Baptist Church, began at about the time of the Revolutionary War. To-day my theme is purely Methodism.

Since the days of the Revolution not only has the Methodist Church increased greatly in the old communities of the thirteen original States, but it has played a peculiar and prominent part in the pioneer growth of our country, and has in consequence assumed a position of immense importance throughout the vast region west of the Alleghanies which has been added to our Nation since the days when the Continental Congress first met.

For a century after the Declaration of Independence the greatest work of our people, with the exception only of the work of self-preservation under Lincoln, was the work of the pioneers as they took possession of this continent. During that century we pushed westward from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, southward to the Gulf and the Rio Grande, and also took possession of Alaska. The work of advancing our boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest and desert and mountain chain, was the great typical work of our Nation; and the men who did it—the frontiersmen, the pioneers, the backwoodsmen, plainsmen, mountain men—formed a class by themselves. It was an iron task, which none but men of iron soul and iron body could do. The men who carried it to a successful conclusion had characters strong alike for good and for evil. Their rugged natures made them powers who served light or darkness with fierce intensity; and together with heroic traits they had those evil and dreadful tendencies which are but too apt to be found in characters of heroic possibilities. Such men make the most efficient servants of the Lord if their abounding vitality and energy are directed aright; and if misdirected their influence is equally potent against the cause of Christianity and true civilization. In the hard and cruel life of the border, with its grim struggle against the forbidding forces of wild nature and wilder men, there was much to pull the frontiersman down. If left to himself, without moral teaching and moral guidance, without any of the influences that tend toward the uplifting of man and the subduing of the brute within him, sad would have been his, and therefore our, fate. From this fate we have been largely rescued by the fact that together with the rest of the pioneers went the pioneer preachers; and all honor be given to the Methodists for the great proportion of these pioneer preachers whom they furnished.

These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter Cartwright—men who suffered and overcame every hardship in common with their flock, and who in addition tamed the wild and fierce spirits of their fellow-pioneers. It was not a task that could have been accomplished by men desirous to live in the soft places of the earth and to walk easily on life’s journey. They had to possess the spirit of the martyrs; but not of martyrs who could merely suffer, not of martyrs who could oppose only passive endurance to wrong. The pioneer preachers warred against the forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery zeal and energy that they and their fellows showed in the conquest of the rugged continent. They had in them the heroic spirit, the spirit that scorns ease if it must be purchased by failure to do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a life of hard endeavor if the goal to be reached is really worth attaining. Great is our debt to these men and scant the patience we need show toward their critics. At times they seemed hard and narrow to those whose training and surroundings had saved them from similar temptations; and they have been criticised, as all men, whether missionaries, soldiers, explorers, or frontier settlers, are criticised when they go forth to do the rough work that must inevitably be done by those who act as the first harbingers, the first heralds, of civilization in the world’s dark places. It is easy for those who stay at home in comfort, who never have to see humanity in the raw, or to strive against the dreadful naked forces which appear clothed, hidden, and subdued in civilized life—it is easy for such to criticise the men who, in rough fashion, and amid grim surroundings, make ready the way for the higher life that is to come afterward; but let us all remember that the untempted and the effortless should be cautious in passing too heavy judgment upon their brethren who may show hardness, who may be guilty of shortcomings, but who nevertheless do the great deeds by which mankind advances. These pioneers of Methodism had the strong, militant virtues which go to the accomplishment of such great deeds. Now and then they betrayed the shortcomings natural to men of their type; but their shortcomings seem small indeed when we place beside them the magnitude of the work they achieved.

And now, friends, in celebrating the wonderful growth of Methodism, in rejoicing at the good it has done to the country and to mankind, I need hardly ask a body like this to remember that the greatness of the fathers becomes to the children a shameful thing if they use it only as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for noble aims. I speak to you not only as Methodists—I speak to you as American citizens. The pioneer days are over. We now all of us form parts of a great civilized nation, with a complex industrial and social life and infinite possibilities both for good and for evil. The instruments with which, and the surroundings in which, we work, have changed immeasurably from what they were in the days when the rough backwoods preachers ministered to the moral and spiritual needs of their rough backwoods congregations. But if we are to succeed, the spirit in which we do our work must be the same as the spirit in which they did theirs. These men drove forward, and fought their way upward, to success, because their sense of duty was in their hearts, in the very marrow of their bones. It was not with them something to be considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, standing separate and apart from their daily life. They had it with them week days as well as Sundays. They did not divorce the spiritual from the secular. They did not have one kind of conscience for one side of their lives and another for another.