That was a mighty trial a supreme test of a marvelous man. He knew the vital consequences bound up in action then. Things could never again be as they were before war was declared. It was not simply a fight with Spain, and a victory over her; it was an advance upon the world. It was not simply measuring lances with Leon and Castile; it was measuring the might of brain and brawn, of courage and skill, of America’s splendid manhood, against all the forces of all the world, and for all time! He could not let his people make a mistake. If he had yielded at the first hot demand for war, the recall would have sounded from millions before the first day’s march was done. But he waited till the pressure of his people proved that they were all of one mind; that they had heard the assembly call of a world duty, and had all “fallen in.” And then he gave the command: “Forward!”
McKinley and expansion!
Has it ever occurred to the reader how small a part of the McKinley expansion is expressed in these figures: “124,340 square miles annexed?”
That is only the land, the rock and soil, the food and drink, the most material and least expressive of all the elements in this material advance. Even in square miles, imagine what the annexation of Hawaii means. Compute the vastness of that realm acquired in the Philippines. Why, it is the breadth of the whole Pacific Ocean, and a path so wide that no nation can send a ship around the world without trespassing on the boundless domain of the young Republic. William McKinley has advanced the borders of his nation to include the seas. He has set the boundaries of the United States of America so far that they embrace one-half the earth. From the sentinel, St. Thomas, eastern outpost in the Atlantic’s waves, across the continent, and out to the farthest verge of the mighty Pacific, to the gates of ancient Asia, he has fixed the frontiers of his country.
That is expansion under McKinley!
CHAPTER XXIII.
SECOND PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION AND ELECTION OF McKINLEY.
That McKinley would receive a second nomination at the hands of his party was settled long before the convention of 1900 was called. The fact that under his administration prosperity had been restored, at once gave him a prestige that only the most egregious blundering could overcome. To blunder was not a characteristic of the President, and he made no false step. His hand was steadily on the helm of the ship of state, and while he never sought for troubled waters, he never turned aside if it was necessary for the public good that they should be encountered.
His splendid handling of all the delicate questions that grew out of the Spanish war, as well as the firmness with which he met that great emergency in our national life, made it appear that to him, and him alone, must be entrusted the task of shaping the policy of the government in its new and suddenly acquired position of a world power.
No Republican throughout the land gave thought for an instant to succeeding the President. His leadership was as pronounced as that of Lincoln, in 1864, or Grant in 1872. Nor was there any question as to party policy. To define the relations of the government as a world power; to tranquillize the new possessions; give them stable government, and ultimately to work out whatever destiny had in store for them and the United States—these were the pressing questions.
To be sure, there were the cries against trusts, a clamor against “government by injunction,” a recrudescence of the silver question, and other matters, but who so well qualified to meet them all safely and creditably to his country as the man who had for so many years, in different spheres of activity, proved his fitness for the work, and his loyalty to the people?