not coherence to his discourse, and force if not light to his explosions.

During the fall of 1897 Mr. Hanna spoke almost every day from September 21 until November 1. His tour covered a large part of the state and included the small towns as well as the cities. The late Senator Frye, who shared many of the platforms with him, testified that day by day Mr. Hanna gained in self-confidence and in his mastery of his hearers. The meetings were unusually large; but during the first tour the audiences were not particularly enthusiastic. They seemed to be prompted more by curiosity than a cordial and sympathetic interest. Two years later when Mr. Frye and Mr. Hanna covered substantially the same territory on another tour their audiences were, according to Mr. Frye, both larger and far more enthusiastic than they had been in 1897.

The voters of Ohio had much more reason in the fall of 1897 to be curious about Mr. Hanna than to have confidence in him. He was one of the best advertised men in the country, but the people did not know him. While they had read a great deal about him in the newspapers, their reading probably misrepresented him and predisposed them against him. He had been portrayed by his opponents as a monster of sordid greed, and as the embodiment of all that was worst in American politics and business. The ordinary man had no convincing reason for entirely rejecting these charges. Even though he discounted them heavily, he might well be prejudiced against their victim. But in any event he would be curious to see the person who was said to have made a President, and who was said to have done these and other things with such evil intentions and by virtue of such dubious methods. He would be all the more curious because Mr. Hanna had become the issue of the campaign. The candidate was being bitterly assailed by the Democrats. All the regular accusations were being revived and being spouted from every Democratic platform. Mr. William J. Bryan was pressed into service, and the campaign of the preceding year was fought over again-but with this difference: the new campaign became essentially personal. The attacks were concentrated on the man who had acted as general during the previous year; and the hope of the Demo

crats was that by the defeat of Mr. Hanna they could claim a reversal of the earlier verdict, weaken the administration and exclude their conqueror from public life.

I shall not quote from the speeches in which Mr. Hanna very vigorously defended himself and in his turn attacked his opponents. The course of political controversy during the next few years enabled Mr. Hanna at a later date to express very much more definitely the group of economic ideas which he believed would contribute most effectually to the welfare of the American people. The substance of his characteristic policy was, indeed, plainly foreshadowed in these earlier speeches. He was already declaring that the dominant purpose of the government's economic legislation should be the stimulation of business activity, and that as a result of such stimulation prosperity would be fairly and evenly distributed throughout the whole of the economic body. He was already claiming that the Dingley Law, which had recently been enacted, had actually begun the work of rescuing business from the depression which had prevailed since 1893. But the prosperity actually created in the fall of 1897 was neither sufficiently emphatic nor sufficiently prevalent to permit the complete and confident development of the foregoing argument. And we may postpone a completer presentation of it until Mr. Hanna could claim with more plausibility and conviction that the national economic policy of the Republican party had actually restored the American people to a condition of comparative comfort and hope. For the rest the general issues involved by Mr. Hanna's personal campaign were an echo of the discussion of the preceding fall. Mr. Bryan's participation in the discussion and the renewal of his pro-silver proselytizing were sufficient to effect this result.

In replying to the personal attacks upon himself Mr. Hanna always spoke with moderation and good judgment. He knew that the best possible answer to the grotesque misrepresentation of which he had been the victim was merely to show himself on the platform and to give his audiences the sense of his personality. So he usually began by saying that no doubt many of his hearers had come to see whether or not he had a pair of horns actually growing upon his head. Specific charges he would deny with a rough indignation that always made an

impression upon his audience. The charge against him of which he most feared the effect, but which was most easy to refute, was that in his own business life he had sweated his employees and opposed their organization. Whenever he spoke in a town in which his own firm possessed interests, he challenged his opponents or his hearers to bring forward a single case in which any one or any group of his employees had been ill-treated by his firm. He could always show that he had paid the highest prevailing wages, and that his laborers were neither crushed nor had any sense of being crushed. And he could show, furthermore, that so far from being hostile to labor organization, he had been unusually friendly to those unions with which his business had brought him into contact. The record of his personal relations to his employees was in every respect thoroughly good, and his opponents in attacking him on that score were trying to storm his intrenchments at their strongest possible point. This phase of the campaign was a source of great benefit to Mr. Hanna. When the canvass was over, his associates, who had been watching closely the effect of his public appearance upon popular opinion, felt sure that he had

won out.

The event justified their anticipations. On the day after the election Mr. Hanna's victory appeared certain. The Republicans were conceded a majority of fifteen on the joint ballot, which seemed to provide a margin large enough for all probable contingencies. Only a very few of the Senators and Assemblymen elected had not been specifically pledged to Mr. Hanna. The name of no other Republican candidate had even been mentioned. It looked like plain sailing. Yet the results were no sooner announced than Mr. Hanna and his friends began to anticipate trouble. On the morning of the election day the Cleveland Leader sounded a warning against treachery and asserted that ballots were being circulated, indicating the method whereby a voter might defeat Mr. Hanna and elect the rest of the Republican ticket. It was remarked after the returns came in that, whereas Governor Bushnell had a plurality of about 28,000, the total plurality of the Republican legislative candidates was less than one-third of that figure. A day or two later Mr. Allen O. Myers, a prominent Democratic machine

politician, asserted confidently in an interview that Mr. Hanna could not hold together the Republican majority in the Legislature. He frankly confessed that the Democrats had planned to sacrifice their candidate for Governor to the capture of the Legislature.

Mr. Hanna's friends have always believed that his enemies, even before the election, deliberately conspired to defeat him by underhand means. They had submitted to his appointment as Senator because they felt sure that in the year of reaction which would probably follow upon a great Republican victory he could not be elected. When they found as a consequence of his appearance on the stump that he was becoming personally popular instead, as they had expected, unpopular, they tried to defeat him (so it was charged) by trading votes for the Governor against votes for legislative candidates. Of course these charges were never proved, but they were made plausible both by the election returns and by the alliance between the Democrats and the Republican malcontents, which was publicly announced after the election.

Among the Republicans the leaders in this conspiracy were Governor Asa T. Bushnell, Charles L. Kurtz, and Robert E. McKisson, Mayor of Cleveland. What Mr. Bushnell's grievance was, I do not know. He was a well-to-do manufacturer and a man of many excellent qualities. He had always been associated with the faction in Ohio politics inimical to Mr. Hanna; but that fact should not have been sufficient to justify an honorable man in assisting so dubious a conspiracy. He may have resented the pressure which had forced him to appoint Mr. Hanna as Senator and have resolved that his appointee should be succeeded by another man. But during the canvass he had spoken from the same platform as Mr. Hanna and had both tacitly and explicitly approved him as the regular Republican candidate for Senator. Nevertheless the day after the election he announced that a Republican would be elected Senator, but carefully eschewed the mention of Mr. Hanna's name-indicating that his line of action had already been. chosen. Later he appointed to the position of Oil Inspector Charles L. Kurtz, who was the leader of the Republican malcontents. Mr. Kurtz had a personal grievance against Mr.

Hanna, which is said to have been based on a misunderstanding.

Neither the Governor nor Mr. Kurtz, however, could have done anything to endanger Mr. Hanna's election, had they not been aided by the local political situation in the two largest cities in the state. The Mayor of Cleveland at that time was Robert E. McKisson. His first election had taken place in the spring of 1895, and was the result of one of those independent movements within the local organization which so frequently disconcerted the plans of the regular Republican machine in Cleveland. McKisson had requested Mr. Hanna's support for his candidacy and had been sharply turned down, because in Mr. Hanna's opinion he had done nothing to entitle him to so responsible a position. He was nominated at the primary in spite of Mr. Hanna's opposition and had been elected. Judging from contemporary newspaper comments, he began by being a fairly good mayor, but later he sought to build up a personal machine at the expense of the city administration. He was reelected in 1897, but in the meantime he had become very much disliked by the prominent business men of Cleveland. McKisson on his side had always retained a lively personal animosity against Mr. Hanna - although his ill-feeling had not prevented him from speaking from the same platform as Mr. Hanna and recommending the latter's election. He himself had never been mentioned as a senatorial candidate. ful in Cuyahoga County and could control the votes of three Republican legislators.

He was still very power

The situation in Cincinnati and Hamilton County was different but equally dangerous. A combination had taken place between the Democrats and the independent Republicans for the purpose of beating the local Republican machine, headed by "Boss" Cox. A joint legislative ticket had been nominated, and there had been elected some few legislative candidates who were really "Silver Republicans," and who were not pledged to support Mr. Hanna. The chief interest of these men was to secure the passage of certain legislation which would help them in their fight against the local machine; but while not pledged to Mr. Hanna, they had not entered into any alliance with his enemies.