seeker, and to pay for it we have drifted a year in hell, with no exit visible.

The politicians and press were shouting themselves blue to inflame the country, but the country was not inflamed, it was waiting for more light, and the self-restrained course of the president in this affair up to that time had inspired the nation with confidence in him: the people were in a temper to stand by him and follow his lead and to tell congress to close its blustering jaws until he had finished with diplomacy. Here this man betrayed his country and himself and threw away the grandest opportunity of a century, from the unutterably mean motive of keeping good terms with the politicians. He did not want to make enemies in his party for fear of losing a second presidential term, so he truckled and gave up his manhood and became a traitor to his trust.

If ever man lived who deserved execration that man is McKinley. McKinley knew that settlement with Spain without war was a practical certainty; Secretary Sherman, Minister Woodford and Congressman Boutelle, who were at the focus of events, tell us that; for him to yield then to the snarl and yelp of congressional blatherskites was an act of contemptible infamy for which there is no language. His position was this: 'Yes, I am morally certain that I can prevent war with its immediate horrors and terrible aftermath; but if I do it I antagonize my party chiefs, I disrupt my party harmony, I dash my hopes of re-election. Lord, it is too much, let this cup pass from me!' And the Lord not being disposed to let the cup pass, the president took it out of His hands and threw it on the ground and broke it, and afterwards named what transpired in consequence of this act of blasphemy and rebellion 'Divine Destiny.'

If the president had resisted congress the latter might have achieved the war in spite of him. But suppose it had; the president would have done his duty, his position would have been impregnable, all the best forces of the

nation would have rallied to him against the politicians, the close of the war would have heard no talk of Asiatic expansion and seen no Philippine horror, and when the fact became known to the people that the politicians had dragged the country into an unnecessary war for their own glory and the political spoils of it, these precious scoundrels would have received from the people the merited punishment of obloquy and the earliest shelving. Had the president been a keen politician even and nothing else, what a chance he had to make himself the nation's idol by merely doing right! But now, for selling his honor and his country to advantage himself, how deeply he is hated by many of his countrymen, and by how many more intensely despised, as the man who has brought more evil and danger upon the United States than any man that ever lived.

But if the president had been a man of common resources and courage the resistance of congress would have ended not by bringing war upon the country, but a grand whipping upon congress from the country. The president would have instantly appealed to the nation for support and pointed out that the negotiations with Spain were advancing to a conclusion satisfactory to both nations without war, he could have shown the people that war would be a crime so long as one possibility of such amicable composition remained, and the great bulk of the people were of a mind to respond loyally. What could the congressional war-maniacs have done then? They could only have slunk discomfited to their holes.

This course by the president would have increased the certainty of amicable settlement by raising the confidence of Spain in the honor of American intentions. Hard it is to say, but Spain had every reason to doubt that honor. Still harder is it to say, as we must, that later events proved Spain right in doubting and our honor a sham. Spain did not believe we were disinterested in demanding Cuba's freedom, hence she held off. If she

could have fully believed this she would have met us with a more open and constructive spirit, and if the president had held out sternly against the windy clamors of bloodthirsty congress she must have believed. This act alone had then gone far to secure Spanish compliance.

It surely needed something like this to convince Spain that we were telling the truth when we said that we solicited Cuba's freedom as an act of humanity. How could Spain know that we were not inveigling her into a war of pretended unselfishness, to snatch her possessions away and keep them ourselves? There were Porto Rico and the Philippines-how could she know that we would not drop the mantle of holiness when we had employed it as an excuse to declare war, and take these possessions also? We may well ask why, seeing that this is what we did. We have seriously considered abandoning our holiness doctrine even with regard to Cuba-how could Spain know that we did not intend this all along? Who knows today that we have not abandoned it? We did not have any honor, and Spain knew that we had none, and we have since proved it to her by doing what we swore that such honorable people as we would never descend to do, and it must be confessed that we placed Spain in a very trying position by insisting that she should behave toward us as if we had honor. If she stumbled a little in trying to act the farce that we demanded, we might take a little of the blame since we planted the stumbling blocks and tripped her besides. It was in the power of congress to prove our honor to her, it was in McKinley's power to do it alone and against congress, but congress did everything to prove the opposite, even to taking McKinley and twisting his rubber back until he cried that he would do the same. Then honorable congress and honorable president together went into war to show Spain by taking and keeping her possessions that they were not fighting her for her possessions.

The sum of this episode is that McKinley was merely a political bird out of the same nest as the others, and that when the executive chair is filled by a party politician the country is no safer than a ship with a crazy pilot or a passenger train with a lunatic engineer. Like the rest, the president exhibited himself as a political speculator and nothing more. He held on to his stock of national peace and honor until he thought he would lose if he held it any longer, and then he threw it on the market and stepped from under. The trenchant question to be asked of the American people is why they pay heed to any words of such a political broker when he asserts the benefits and divine destiny of expansion. His acts have already shown that he is merely ‘yarning' to fill his political pockets.

Democrats, with usual partisan blindness, may imagine these words to be a partisan attack in their favor. They are not in the least so, but are designed to teach something rather higher than that rusty old saw, 'Turn the old rascals out and put the new rascals in.' In this SpanishPhilippine affair the politician has betrayed his character and given the country a magnificent spectacle of what he is. If the country learns this it will take power out of the politicians' hands, both as congressman and president. Congressmen betrayed us into a needless war because they were politicians, the president succumbed to them at the critical hour and joined them in committing the nation because he was a politician. The personal considerations of these professionals decided that the American people must fight an unnecessary and therefore unjust war, and that they must waste their blood and treasure. Common-sense says that it is ridiculous to give such power into the keeping of such men, and ridiculous to repose it in the care of any men.

On the 19th of April, 1898, the Congress of the United States passed the most remarkable resolution ever adopted by mankind: "First-That the people of the island of Cuba are, and by right ought to be, free and independent." It gave for its reason that Spain was doing the Cubans too much harm in trying to subdue them, that she was excessively injuring the Cubans in attempting to reimpose her broken sovereignty. right to interfere was derived from humanity.

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The American executive (McKinley) approved this resolution the next day. It required no struggle of mind for him to see that Cuba was and ought to be free. Congress did not say autonomous, it said independent and McKinley followed. In his message (Dec. 5, 1898,) he explained why congress had a right to declare and make Cuba free. He said: "No alternative, save physical exhaustion of either combatants and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how far distant no one could venture to conjecture." The natives were being exterminated and the island devastated by Spain's military arm, and "the autonomist administration set up in the capital and some of the principal cities appeared not to gain the favor of the inhabitants, nor to be able to extend their influence to the large extent of territory held by the insurgents." Hence, "In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of