Address of President Roosevelt at Canton, Ohio, September 30, 1907

WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1907

We have gathered together to-day to pay our meed of respect and affection to the memory of William McKinley, who as President won a place in the hearts of the American people such as but three or four of all the Presidents of this country have ever won. He was of singular uprightness and purity of character, alike in public and in private life; a citizen who loved peace, he did his duty faithfully and well for four years of war when the honor of the nation called him to arms. As Congressman, as governor of his State, and finally as President, he rose to the foremost place among our statesmen, reaching a position which would satisfy the keenest ambition; but he never lost that simple and thoughtful kindness toward every human being, great or small, lofty or humble, with whom he was brought in contact, which so endeared him to our people. He had to grapple with more serious and complex problems than any President since Lincoln, and yet, while meeting every demand of statesmanship, he continued to live a beautiful and touching family life, a life very healthy for this nation to see in its foremost citizen; and now the woman who walked in the shadow ever after his death, the wife to whom his loss was a calamity more crushing than it could be to any other human being, lies beside him here in the same sepulcher.
There is a singular appropriateness in the inscription on his monument. Mr. Cortelyou, whose relations with him were of such close intimacy, gives me the following information about it: On the President’s trip to the Pacific slope in the spring of 1901 President Wheeler, of the University of California, conferred the degree of LL. D. upon him in words so well chosen that they struck the fastidious taste of John Hay, then Secretary of State, who wrote and asked for a copy of them from President Wheeler. On the receipt of this copy he sent the following letter to President McKinley, a letter which now seems filled with a strange and unconscious prescience: