appropriate a disproportionate share of the freedom for themselves. Neither of the parties and few of the older politicians had any vision of the changes that must be made to restore a reasonable degree of opportunity to the tenant farmer and the tenement workman. In the great cities, boss rule was still defiant, and much of the organic strength of both parties depended upon corrupt manipulation of votes and selfish use of the power derived from this manipulation. Quay, Platt, and Hanna had succeeded to the leadership formerly exercised by Conkling, Cameron, and Blaine, but brought little change for the better in their understanding of the duties of the modern state.

In the People's Party the protest against this indifference of the party organizations became a matter of religion.

Republican

counterreformation

Both parties, in its belief, were corrupt and unresponsive. Measures that were designed to broaden the opportunities of life or to break the power of the bosses were accepted without criticism or examination and incorporated in the miscellaneous catalogue of reforms that constituted the Populist platform. The interest in these reforms was widely spread among citizens of no political activity and gained earnest converts among young Republican politicians who found their aspirations checked by the compact machinery of the G.O.P. The stress of the currency campaign kept party regularity well to the fore until 1896, but thereafter signs are visible of a counter-reformation within the Republican Party working to detach it from its close alliance with business and to make it more truly a party of the people.

The "in

The attack of the Populists upon the mechanics of the great parties resolved itself into the demand for specific reforms including the direct election of Senators terests" in and an increase in direct control over governpolitics ment by the people. The initiative and the referendum seemed adapted to correct the abuses due to improper control of the legislatures of the States. The control of State legislation was an avowed policy of the railroads and the larger corporations. Most commonly it took

the form of dissuading the legislatures from passing antagonistic laws. The railroad managers who employed their lobbyists declared that this was necessary to prevent blackmail, and asserted that unscrupulous legislators introduced hostile legislation for the sole purpose of having it bought off. In spite of the fact that railroad commissions had been numerous for more than twenty years, little had been done to equalize rates or to impose a fair burden of taxation upon railroad property. The distrust of legis latures revealed itself in long and minute State constitutions. If the people could act directly, it was hoped that some of the abuses might be avoided. The advocates of initiative and referendum had this end in view.

The direct primary was urged, as early as 1897, as an additional means of safeguarding the Government against bosses and corrupt interests. In that year Direct Robert M. La Follette advanced a general pro- primaries gram for direct nominations for office, including even the presidency. La Follette had already served three terms in Congress where his ready mastery of figures made him one of the most serviceable of Republican members on the Committee on Ways and Means. Defeated for reëlection in 1890, he suffered with the Republican Government of Wisconsin because of the attempt of that Government to compel a wider use of the English language in the schools. He soon came back into politics and was beaten for the nomination as governor in 1896 by what he regarded as a corrupt manipulation of delegates against him. His reform of the convention system was based upon his own experience with it. And as he renewed his efforts for the nomination in 1898 and 1900, keeping up continuously a hot fire upon the nomination system, he attracted to his reform other leaders who like him were disappointed because of their inability to beat the machine.

The leaders of reform were Republican after 1896, as they had generally been Democratic or Populist in the years immediately preceding. With little encouragement from the G.O.P., they were heartened by an increasing interest

Submergence of reform

among the people at large. By 1900, in which year La Follette succeeded in securing both nomination and election as governor of his State, the leaders of the counter-reformation began to make an impression upon the party by their local successes. They worked under the handicap of national prosperity, and struggled for the attention of a people who had forgotten the pangs of the panic of 1893 and had been distracted from affairs domestic by the glitter of unexpected and successful foreign war.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years (1895), was published before his collapse in McKinley's Cabinet. His official biography is Winfield S. Kerr, John Sherman, His Life and Public Services (1908); briefer and better is Theodore E. Burton, John Sherman (1906). William Roscoe Thayer, Life and Letters of John Hay (1915), is a notable contribution. Robert M. La Follette, Autobiography (1913), may be profitably read in connection with Isaac Stephenson, Recollections of a Long Life, 1829-1915 (privately printed, 1915). Other useful books are J. L. Laughlin and H. P. Willis, Reciprocity (1903); G. H. Haynes, The Election of Senators (1906); Ellis P. Oberholtzer, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall in America (1911); John Moody, The Truth about the Trusts (1904); and W. Z. Ripley, Trusts, Pools, and Corporations (1905).

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WAR WITH SPAIN

THE venerable John Sherman, of Ohio, chief of McKinley's Cabinet, had been selected as Secretary of State because his years of experience as a financial statesman had qualified him to undertake the difficult negotiation of an agreement for international bimetallism, to which the Republican Party had pledged itself in 1896. A secondary reason for his appointment lay in the fact that Marcus Alonzo Hanna, of Cleveland, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and astute guardian of McKinley's aspirations, desired to enter the Senate. It was not certain in advance that Governor Horace Bushnell, of Ohio, would consent to gratify this aspiration, for the rifts among Ohio politicians ran deep into their political organizations, but the matter worked out as desired, and Hanna assumed the senatorship as Sherman undertook the tasks of foreign secretary.

Among the minor pledges of the Republican Party in 1896 was a plank pledging action toward the ending of a painful revolution then in progress on the Island Cuban paciof Cuba. But few imagined that this revolu- fication tion contained the germs of war, nor could Sherman have been named as foreign secretary with Cuba as a major subject for prospective diplomacy. On the theme of Cuba, Sherman as a Senator had often expressed himself in language unmeasured and severe, upon evidence no weightier than that contained in the headlines of the daily yellow press. Coincident with the Cuban revolt a new journalism had developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Alfred Charles Harmsworth had taken over the Daily Mail in London, and William Randolph Hearst had acquired control of the New York Journal. With similar tactics both of these editors had developed a journalism of sentimentality and exaggeration, and the latter had seized upon the events of

the Cuban insurrection with a purpose to manufacture from them a war with Spain.

Insurrec

It was in February, 1895, that insurgents in the eastern end of Cuba revived the guerrilla warfare that had been suspended for seventeen years, since the close of tion of 1895 the ten years' war. Spanish administration in Cuba had not improved in the intervening years. Havana, as the center of culture and capital of the island, had lorded it over the backwoods regions of the eastern provinces. Madrid had failed to take seriously the problem of colonial responsibility at a time when the rest of western Europe was awakening not only to a national appreciation of the value of colonies, but also to an acceptance of a duty in advance of exploitation.

The insurgents of 1895, badly armed and poorly organized, were unable to maintain in Cuba anything resembling a de facto government. Early in the outbreak their leader, Gomez, inaugurated a policy of devastation and directed the destruction of the sugar-cane and mills of the Spanish loyalists. Upon this pretext a strong-armed military governor, General Valeriano Weyler, was sent out from Spain to conquer peace. At Weyler's command the rebellious population, and even the suspected population of the infected districts, were swept away from their homes and concentrated in observation camps. Here in barbedwire enclosures they were allowed to sicken, starve, and die uncared for. Across the whole width of the island toward its eastern end, he cleared a broad band from its jungle entanglements and built a wire fence or trocha which he patrolled constantly in the hope of confining the marauding patriot bands within their provinces north of Santiago. The horrors incidental to this campaign of suppression were seized upon and exploited by the press. The excesses of the Cuban patriots were extenuated or ignored, while those of the Spanish army were displayed as evidence of inherent corruption, deception, and incapacity.

The revolutionary government had no real existence on the island, but a handful of its leaders, safely living in New