fit to go to war. In this year, however, Congress authorized the preparation of plans for a group of steel cruisers and in subsequent acts the birth of a new navy was authorized. A new American industry had to be created before the navy could appear. The ideas of protection, that were crying more insistently for economic independence of Europe, forbade the purchase of a navy abroad. It accordingly became necessary to provide armor-plate mills and gun foundries as well as to design the steel hulls that were to bear the ordnance. Three little unprotected cruisers, the Atlanta, Chicago, Charleston, and a lighter craft, the Dolphin, "constituted the first attempt of the Navy Department for many years to construct a war vessel up to the modern requirements." The earliest of the cruisers was commissioned in 1887. In the autumn of this year the Atlanta and the Dolphin engaged in what were called maneuvers in an attack at Newport, where a Naval War College had been brought into existence in 1885.

From its first units of unprotected light cruisers the naval program developed into armored cruisers, and then to battleships, whose plate and guns were manufactured in the United States. The Indiana was the earliest of the new craft to be commissioned, coming into active service in November, 1895. The Massachusetts, Oregon, and Iowa were under construction in the yards, but would have been unavailable had war occurred with England in 1895.

A part of the scheme for modernizing the navy included a Naval War College for the post-graduate instruction of naval officers. Stephen B. Luce was detailed to command the new enterprise, which opened its first session in 1885. The greatest service of Luce, who organized the college, was to summon thither Alfred Thayer Mahan, who at the age of fortyfive "was drifting on the lines of simple respectability as aimlessly as any one very well could." Mahan took his duties seriously, began to lecture on naval history in the fall of 1886, and a few years later produced, in The Influence of Sea-Power upon History (1890), the most important contribution of his generation to the philosophy of national strength.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y

AMERICAN SHIPS OF WAR, 1887 AND 1921

THE ATLANTA, FIRST OF THE NEW NAVY, AND THE TENNESSEE,

COMMISSIONED 1920

The Tennessee is very much larger than the Atlanta, measuring 600 feet on the water-line, while the length of the Atlanta was 276 feet. She is shown stern on, heading away from the spectator.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A good general view of the period may be constructed from James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. vif; D. R. Dewey, National Problems (1907); and Paul L. Haworth, The United States in Our Own Times (1920). Grover Cleveland, Presidential Problems (1904), discusses and defends the bond issues. A. D. Noyes, Thirty Years of American Finance (1898), is by a veteran financial writer. J. M. Gould and G. F. Tucker, The Federal Income Tax Explained (1895), lost its timeliness when the tax was declared unconstitutional. William F. Draper, Recollections

of a Varied Career (1908), gives a manufacturer's view of the nineties. A. T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam (1907), is the autobiography of the leading naval historian. G. W. Steevens, The Land of the Dollar (1897), is a crisp, journalistic record of an American tour.

CHAPTER XXII

THE FIRST MCKINLEY CAMPAIGN, 1896

THE "stirring events in our foreign relations" that occurred during the administration of Cleveland involved the President in much controversy and reënforced the efforts to place the navy upon a modern basis, but had no "influence in shaping the canvass of 1896, or in determining its result." Before the Congress chosen in November, 1894, took its seat, Cleveland had lost the hold over his party to which his reëlection was due and had become an executive unable to direct the course of current affairs. The opposition party was intent upon assembling the partisan materials to be used in regaining national control; the Democracy was hopelessly split and without a leader; and along the western horizon the gathering power of the People's Party threatened to retire one of the two major parties into obscurity.

Protection was the bond that held the Republican Party organization together after 1887. Until the date of Cleve

Protection and the gold standard

land's memorable tariff message it was a general custom to apologize for the tariff as it had by accident become. From that date the party tactics changed, and the intent was openly avowed to make protection more systematic and complete than it had ever been. The defeat of Cleveland in 1888 made it possible for this purpose to be executed in the McKinley Bill of 1890; the defeat of Republican candidates in the ensuing elections raised a doubt as to the degree in which the people approved the policy, but only strengthened the determination of the Republican organization to perfect its own articulation upon this issue. For the first time since plantation economics controlled the policy of the Democratic Party in the middle of the century, a situation had arisen in which the success of one party appeared to be