disinterested personal devotion; but in the case of Mr. McKinley the personal devotion was heightened by feelings derived from another source. This particular friendship had awakened his aspirations. His general disposition was such that an ideal could make a peculiarly strong appeal to him only when it was embodied in a human being. Mr. McKinley's finer qualities aroused in him the utmost admiration. He was profoundly impressed by the unfailing patience, consideration and devotion which his friend had lavished on an ailing and difficult wife. He was, perhaps, even more impressed by Mr. McKinley's repeated refusals to obtain any political advantage by compromises with conscience. As he himself has said, Mr. McKinley's declaration that there were some things which a Presidential candidate must not do even to be President had made a better man of him. And undoubtedly his friend's influence upon his life and career was really elevating. His own personal standards of behavior in politics steadily improved, partly because he was fully capable of rising to a responsibility, as well as to an opportunity, but also partly because of the leavening effect of his association with his friend. This association had meant to Mr. Hanna more than his fame, his career and his public achievements. It had meant as well the increase of public usefulness and personal self-respect which a man can obtain only by remaining true to a certain standard of public behavior.

Towards the end of his life Mr. Hanna became increasingly aware of a difference between himself and Mr. McKinley in their respective attitudes towards personal ties and responsibilities. He never gave explicit expression to this difference, but he was glancing at it in the following passage in the National Magazine on "McKinley as I knew Him." "We were both," he says, "of Scotch-Irish descent, but opposite in disposition. He was of more direct descent than I, but it was thought from our dispositions that he had the Scotch and I had the Irish of the combination." What he means by this is probably that personal relationships were not so vital to Mr. McKinley as they were to himself. Mr. McKinley acted less than he did on the prompting of instinct and affection. The mere fact that the President was the more conscientious man of the two

tended also to make him more conscious and less consistent in his feelings. Mr. McKinley was solicitous of the appearance which he was making to the world and posterity, and this quality might sometimes give his behavior at least the appearance of selfishness. I am not implying that he was not a loyal and in his way a sincere man; but loyalty was not to him as fundamental a virtue as it was to Mr. Hanna. He might have considered the possibility of breaking with his friend under conditions which would in Mr. Hanna's eyes have wholly failed to justify the rupture. In point of fact the latent and actual differences between the two men never gathered to a head. I have told the story of their few important disagreements; but the wonder is, not that they were there to tell, but that they were not more frequent and more serious. They do not in any way invalidate the popular impression that the association between the two men was, perhaps, the most loyal friendship which has become a part of American political history.

An honest friendship endures, not because it does not have any differences to overcome, but because it is strong enough to overcome such differences as inevitably occur. The association of Mr. Hanna and Mr. McKinley was punctuated with many trivial disputes which never became serious, partly because of the President's tact. The two men had to reach a mutually acceptable decision about thousands of bits of official business or policy in the course of a year. Their decisions were at times bound to diverge, and when such divergence arose they might for a moment wear the appearance of being serious. Mr. Hanna was a plain-dealer, honest and fearless to a fault, brusque sometimes in manner, quick in feeling and explosive in speech. When he disagreed with another man he might say so with both heat and energy. Under such circumstances Mr. McKinley was at his best. He was too tactful and prudent to make matters worse by any contradiction or disputation. He knew that in a few minutes or hours the storm would blow over, and that Mr. Hanna would then be willing to resume the discussion with a cool head and the utmost good temper.

These, however, were small things. What really tested the friendship was the change which gradually took place in their

respective public positions. Mr. McKinley was, as I have said, extremely solicitous of his reputation. From the day he was first elected President he was represented as being under Mr. Hanna's control far more than was actually the case and to an extent which must have been galling. In matters of public policy he was always his own master—at least so far as Mr. Hanna was concerned; and even in the latter's own special field of political management he by no means merely submitted to Mr. Hanna's dictation. Mr. George B. Cortelyou, who had the best opportunities for judging, considered that Mr. McKinley was an abler politician than Mr. Hanna - and this in spite of the fact that he ranks Mr. Hanna's ability very high. Mr. McKinley did not get the credit for being either as independent, as courageous or as self-dependent as he really was. Furthermore, as time went on, Mr. Hanna increased rather than diminished in public stature; and as he increased the President became not absolutely but relatively smaller. Comic papers like Life published cartoons, in one of which Mr. Hanna was represented as a tall robust English gentleman with Mr. McKinley at his side dressed in a short coat and knee breeches. It was entitled "Buttons." Such a portrayal of their relationship would have been exasperating even had it been true; but it was not true.

If there had been any truth in it, the friendship between the two men could not have lasted. Mr. McKinley was bound to overlook the occasional public perversion of their relation one to another, because as a matter of fact Mr. Hanna had always recognized in his behavior towards his friend the essential difference in their positions. Mr. McKinley was the master, Mr. Hanna was only the able and trusted Prime Minister. The latter never presumed upon his friendship with the President, upon the contribution he had made towards Mr. McKinley's nomination or election or upon the increasing independence and stability of his own public position. Everybody most familiar with their private relations testifies that Mr. Hanna asked for nothing in the way of patronage to which he was not fully entitled. The extent of his ability or his willingness to obtain favors on merely personal grounds was very much overestimated. He was erroneously credited, for instance, with

many of Mr. McKinley's own appointments to offices in Ohio. Of course he was more assertive in urging upon the President appointments which were in his opinion necessary for the welfare of the party, and his judgment about such matters frequently differed from that of the President. But even in this respect their peculiar relationship was mutually helpful, because each could in some measure protect the other against excessive demands on the part of Republican politicians.

At bottom the central fact in the relationship was the disinterestedness of Mr. Hanna. He was able to maintain his friendship with the President under very trying conditions because his recommendations were made, not in his own interest but in that of the President, the party or the country. He never sought to use his existing power, from whatever source it came, for the sake merely of increasing it. His waxing personal influence was always the by-product of his actual services to some individual, organization or cause. The late Bishop Potter said of his management of the Civic Federation that he had grown up to the job; and the comment supplies the clew to all the success of his career. He had grown up to one job after another. He had grown up to the job of nominating his friend as Presidential candidate, to the job of managing a critical and strenuous national campaign, to the job of securing the personal confidence of the American business interest, to the job of making himself personally popular with the people of Ohio, to the job of becoming one of the steering committee of the Senate, and finally, as we shall see, to the job of obtaining effective influence over organized labor as well as organized capital. But in his assumption and exercise of these activities he had never planned his own personal aggrandizement. He was loyal, that is, to the proper limitations of his various official and unofficial duties; and this just estimate of the limits of his power was merely another aspect of his personal loyalty his disposition to allow other people a freedom of movement analogous to his own. He did not pervert his opportunities, because he would not bring pressure to bear upon his friends or demand of them excessive and unnecessary sacrifices.

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In the case of President McKinley he was the more bound to scrupulous loyalty because of his affection for the friend,

because of his reverence for the office and because of his admiration for the man. He spoke and wrote of Mr. McKinley, particularly after the latter's death, in terms that may seem extravagant, but which are undoubtedly sincere and which really revealed his feelings at the time. "It is difficult," he says, "for me to express the extent of the love and respect which I, in common with many others, felt for him personally. The feeling was the outgrowth of an appreciation of his noble selfsacrificing nature. My affection for him and faith and confidence in him always seemed to be reciprocated, to the extent that there was never an unpleasant word passed between us, and the history of his administration, his Cabinet and his associations with public men was entirely free from intrigue and base selfishness. I had the closest revelations of William McKinley's character, I think, in our quiet hours of smoking and chatting when all the rest had retired. For past midnight we have sat many times talking over those matters which friends always discuss - and the closer I came to the man, the more lovable his character appeared. There was revealed the gentle growing greatness of the man who knew men, respected them and loved them. These pleasant episodes of a purely personal nature are emphasized more and more as I think of him, and it is these that I most cherish in the memory of the man. His greatness as a statesman was but the reflection of his greatness as a man." And in an address delivered at Toledo in September, 1903, on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial statue to Mr. McKinley, Mr. Hanna said: "The truest monument of the life of William McKinley was built and erected stone by stone as he lived his noble useful life until it touched the sky and was finished by the hands of the angels. It is the monument of a good man's great love for his country and will forever and forever remain as an example to us all."

The preceding quotations must not, of course, be considered as a critical judgment on Mr. McKinley's character and career, but as the tribute of a friend, the warmth of whose admiration had been increased by the President's tragic death. In Mark Hanna's life Mr. McKinley had been the personal embodiment of those qualities of unselfishness, kindness and patriotism which in the preceding quotations the Senator