This closes the chapter of his life which was concerned in legislation. It is the end of his congressional career. If any man shall ask what was the greatest achievement of those fourteen years, the answer must be: “William McKinley’s triumph for Protection!” He was the champion of that doctrine, the first man to advocate it as a principle to be preserved until the need should pass, the first to put a conscience in the discussions of a tariff. And he was, without exception, the ablest man that ever defended it, the bravest man that ever advocated it, the most successful man that ever supported it. Protection was by no means his one accomplishment. He was active in all legislation, neglectful of none. But his position on the Ways and Means Committee, so long held, made this master issue his chief concern. CHAPTER XIII. McKINLEY’S LIFE WAS PROTECTION’S ERA. It is a curious fact that the public service of William McKinley began with the rise of the protective era, and ended with the passing of that system as a dominant and paramount policy in the history of the American republic. His life embraces the era of protection to American industry. As he was its most sagacious and successful champion, as he in his labors expressed that thought as the controlling motive in governmental policy, so his death falls in the year when a protective tariff is recognized on all hands as having accomplished its great and useful mission. And the passing of McKinley is the retiring-time of that issue which has, more than anything else, made a mighty nation on the western continent. It may be fairly said that there was no protective tariff, as such, until the close of the war. Such efforts in that direction as had been made under the leadership of Henry Clay and the earlier theorists among statesmen never rose to the magnitude of impressing a national policy, for the reason that the country was not ripe for them. In that formative period which preceded the election of Lincoln, men might speculate and debate and prophesy about free trade and protection, but the Union as a nation was growing; and it needed the great issue no more than a boy of fifteen needs the book called “Every Man His Own Lawyer.” The nation was growing. It wanted farmers to broaden the plowland area, to lay the wide and deep foundation of agriculture, which must be the first step toward the construction of a great and permanent country. Of course the Morrill tariff bill was not a measure of protection. It was a war measure. The question of economics was by no means necessary, and by no means invoked in that debate which preceded the enactment of the great tariff measure of 1861, or the supplementary bills which succeeded it in the process of raising revenue for the struggling nation. But when the war was over men of all parties and of every section were face to face with the greatest problem that has ever affected civil government.