There is no royal road to success, no short cut-off to eminence. Whatever is of great worth must cost great labor. William McKinley had put into his preparation for that work all the years of his adult life. He knew the subject as no other man in the nation knew it. And when, as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at last he was commissioned to write a tariff bill, he gave himself wholly and utterly to the task. No laborer in the mills which his policy safeguarded put in so many hours daily as did William McKinley in the preparation of that great measure. He worked all day in Committee or on the floor of the House, consuming nervous force in a manner which would have utterly broken down a less magnificent physique than his own. And then every night he received representatives of various industries from all over the nation—from the farms, from the mines, from the mills, from the stores, from the offices of transportation companies. And they testified a thousand times that he knew their case far better than did they. Yet he heard them patiently, respectfully, discussed the schedules with them, and out of all the information he could gather produced that bill which stands for the highest expression of statesmanship any republic has ever known. It was characteristic of the man that he should in the very van of his argument place a statement that would challenge the general attention of the public, regardless of party. No reader who recognizes the significance of effective work in debate can fail to catch the value of these calm, deliberate sentences: “If any one thing was settled by the election of 1888, it was that the protective policy, as promulgated in the Republican platform, and heretofore inaugurated and maintained by the Republican party, should be secured in any fiscal legislation to be had by the Congress chosen in that great contest and upon that mastering issue. I have interpreted that victory to mean, and the majority in this House and in the Senate to mean, that a revision of the tariff is not only demanded by the votes of the people, but that such revision should be on the line and in full recognition of the principle and purpose of protection. The people have spoken; they want their will registered and their decree embodied in public legislation. The bill which the Committee on Ways and Means have presented is their answer and interpretation of that victory, and in accordance with its spirit and letter and purpose. We have not been compelled to abolish the internal-revenue system that we might preserve the protective system, which we were pledged to do in the event that the abolition of the one was essential to the preservation of the other. That was unnecessary.