to Mr. Kohlsaat the decision to insert that word was reached only after a protracted discussion and a sharp controversy between himself and Mr. Hanna. Not until four o'clock in the afternoon, after Mr. Hanna had withdrawn, was an agreement obtained. In view of the unanimity of his friends Mr. Hanna gave his consent and agreed to urge its acceptance on Mr. McKinley. It was Colonel Herrick who telegraphed to the candidate and obtained his approval. According to the testimony of Colonel Herrick, Mr. Kohlsaat, Mr. Merriam and Senator Proctor, the whole matter was settled, so far as Mr. McKinley and his friends were concerned, by Friday night.

In the several accounts of these conferences, the one doubtful point is whether or not the word "gold" was contained in the draft prepared by Mr. Payne. The matter is not of great importance, except in respect to Mr. Kohlsaat's claim that he, more than any single individual, was responsible for its insertion and that he was called a "d-d fool" by Mr. Hanna for his pains. The only available account from Mr. Hanna himself of his own relation to the gold plank is contained in the following letter to A. K. McClure, written on June 28, 1900.

"MY DEAR MR. MCCLURE:

"I am in receipt of yours of the 21st inst., which has just been reached in my accumulation of letters. I do not care to have go into print all that I told you personally in regard to the gold plank of the St. Louis platform. When I went to St. Louis I took with me a memorandum on the tariff and financial questions drawn by Mr. McKinley. During all the discussions there prior to the action of the Committee on Resolutions I showed it to a few friends and had it rewritten by the Hon. J. K. Richards, the present U. S. Solicitor General. It was but slightly changed by those who considered it before it went to the Committee and as presented was passed by the Committee with little or no change. My part of the business was to harmonize all sections and prevent any discussion of the subject outside the Committee which would line up any factions against it (except the ultra silver men). In that I succeeded, and felt willing to give all the credit claimed by those who assisted. The original memorandum is in the possession of a personal friend, whom I do not care

to name without his consent. The whole thing was managed in order to succeed in getting what we got, and that was my only interest.

"Sincerely yours,

"M. A. HANNA."

The foregoing letter, while it throws no light upon the time and occasion of the insertion of the decisive word into the draft supplies the clew which enables us to interpret Mr. Hanna's own behavior, both during these conferences and thereafter. He himself was in favor of the gold standard, and in favor of a declaration to that effect. But partly because of his loyalty to Mr. McKinley, and partly because he did not want any decisive step taken until the sentiment of the delegates had been disclosed, he preferred to have his hand forced, and he did not want to have it forced too soon. Although a decision, so far as Mr. McKinley and his friends were concerned, had been reached on Friday, public announcement of the fact was scrupulously avoided; and Mr. Hanna evidently proposed to avoid it as long as he could. It was essential, considering the divergence of opinion among Mr. McKinley's supporters, that the candidate's official representative should not assume the position of publicly and explicitly asking the Convention to adopt the gold standard. Mr. McKinley's personal popularity would suffer much less in case every superficial fact pointed to the conclusion that the gold standard was being forced on him by an irresistible party sentiment.

As a matter of fact such was the case. As the delegates gathered in St. Louis, the friends of the gold standard learned for the first time their own strength. Business men east of the Mississippi had been reaching the conclusion that the country could never emerge from the existing depression until a gold standard of value was assured. They and their representatives learned at St. Louis that this opinion had become almost unanimous among responsible and well-informed men. Mr. Hanna received shoals of telegrams from business men of all degrees of importance insisting upon such action. The substantial unanimity of this sentiment among Republican leaders, particularly in the Middle West, clinched the matter. Mr. McKinley would not

have consented to any decisive utterance, had he not been convinced that the great majority of his friends and his party were unalterably in favor of it. Every one of the participants in the preliminary conferences considered it desirable, and their united recommendation constituted a constraining force which Mr. McKinley could not ignore. Such being the case, any controversy as to the precise time and occasion of the insertion of the word "gold" into the actual draft becomes of small importance. It would have been inserted anyway, not by any one man or by the representatives of any one section, but because the influential members of the party, except in the Far West, had become united on the subject. Credit, however, particularly attaches to those Middle Western politicians and business men, who had the intelligence to understand and the courage to insist that the day for equivocation in relation to this essential issue had passed, and who persuaded Mr. McKinley that he must stand on a gold platform even at some sacrifice of personal prestige and perhaps at some risk of personal success.

If Mr. McKinley had failed to consent to the insertion of the word "gold," and had prevailed upon all his intimate friends to assume the same attitude, he might possibly have prevented his own nomination. At all events, as soon as Mr. McKinley's opponents arrived, they immediately began an attack on what was manifestly the weak point in the McKinley fortifications. They knew that his nomination was assured, unless, perchance, he could be placed in opposition to the will of the Convention upon some important matter, and of course they represented a part of the country, in which public opinion in general was more united in favor of the gold standard than it was in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Senators Lodge and Platt reached St. Louis on Sunday. They learned of the controversy over the currency plank, but not about the decision actually reached. Senator Lodge went immediately to the McKinley headquarters. In his ensuing interview with Mr. Hanna the latter gave him no encouragement about the insertion into the plank of the word "gold." Mr. Lodge and exGovernor Draper were shown the drafts of two resolutions, one of which was understood to have just arrived from Canton, and neither of which committed the party to the gold standard.

Senator Lodge then told Mr. Hanna that these drafts were unsatisfactory, and that Massachusetts would demand a vote upon any similar plank. After some further talk Mr. Lodge went away, but he served notice on Mr. Hanna that efforts would be made to consolidate the sentiment in the Convention opposed to any "straddle." By Monday night the advocates of the gold standard had a majority of the Convention rounded up in favor of an unequivocal declaration in its favor.

Of course, this was precisely the result which Mr. Hanna wanted. The evidence is conclusive that on Friday night both he and Mr. McKinley were prepared to accept a decisive gold plank (which he personally had always approved) but, as he says in his letter to Mr. McClure, his part of the business was "to prevent any discussion of the subject outside of the Committee on Resolutions, which would line up any factions against it." That is, he proposed to leave the action of the Convention on the plank uncertain, until the Committee on Resolutions could launch a draft which would have the great majority of the Convention behind it, and which would constrain the doubters and the trimmers. By failing to tell Senator Lodge that a draft containing the word "gold" had already been accepted by McKinley, he astutely accomplished his part of the business. He arranged for the consolidation of the sentiment in favor of the gold standard, while he prevented any consolidation of the sentiment against it, except on the part of the irreconcilables. If he had announced as early as Saturday or Sunday that a declaration in favor of the gold standard would be supported by Mr. McKinley's friends and probably adopted by the Convention, a considerable number of half-hearted and double-minded delegates might have been won over by the leaders of the silver faction. And it might have seemed like a desertion by McKinley of the pro-silver delegates, who had been prevented by the ambiguity of the candidate's previous attitude from opposing him.

The text of the plank as it came from the Committee and appeared in the platform, read as follows:

"The Republican party is unreservedly for sound money. It caused the enactment of a law providing for the resumption of specie payments in 1879. Since then every dollar has been

as good as gold. We are unalterably opposed to every measure calculated to debase our currency or impair the credit of our country. We are therefore opposed to the free coinage of silver, except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the earth, which agreement we pledge ourselves to promote; and until such agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be maintained. All of our silver and paper currency must be maintained at parity with gold, and we favor all measures designed to maintain inviolably the obligations of the United States, and all our money, whether coin or paper, at the present standard, the standard of the most enlightened nations of the earth.”

A comparison of the foregoing text with the draft worked up by the preliminary conference discloses only unimportant changes. The "free and unlimited coinage of silver" gets along without the "and unlimited." The draft wants an international agreement with "the commercial nations of Europe," whereas the plank is not satisfied with an agreement with anything less than the whole earth. The plank pledges the party to promote such an agreement, and the draft does not. In the plank "we believe that" is very properly omitted before "the existing gold standard," which is to be "preserved" in the plank and "maintained" in the draft. The plank does not favor the use of silver as currency, and in this respect it is a palpable improvement over the draft. The actual wording was the result of the scrutiny and coöperation of very many minds; and on the whole the last version, the one actually presented to the Convention, is the best. But this version was, of course, the result of the closest kind of criticism applied to the original McKinley draft. It was first worked over by the conference of Mr. McKinley's friends and reduced to the form given on page 197. This form was placed in charge of William R. Merriam, the only man participating in the conference, who was also a member of the Committee on Resolutions. It was submitted by him at Mr. Hanna's request to the chairman of the Committee and presumably received his approval. Mr. Merriam is the connecting link between the preliminary conferences of Mr. McKinley's supporters and the Committee on Resolutions. Mr. Foraker, in his pamphlet on "The Gold Plank," published