It was clear to him that for twenty years after the war the nation would be busy in construction; that the general aim would be to establish productive industries—North and South—that men would be building homes, advancing into new country, opening new mines, reaching farther into the wilderness, reclaiming more and more of the waste land, building more railroads, launching more steamships; and that there would come a period of erecting new homes, of beautifying, of adornment, of polish; and that then would come an era of study toward the conservation of forces, the learning of less expensive ways of doing what had been effectively done before—the era of economizing—to be swiftly followed by the era of stupendous wealth. And let that man who contends the essentials of this picture were not foreseen by William McKinley account on any other basis, if he can, for that statesman’s steadfast progress toward the one result which they alone could produce. Let that man who denies, reflect for a moment that these stages of development—from first to last—were foretold by William McKinley in a thousand speeches. It is not contended that in 1876 he “revealed” to his fellows that war with Spain would come in 1898; nor that he declared in 1880 that “the flag of the free” would wave over lands in the shadows of Asia at the sunrise of a new century. But no man who knows the history of his country and follows well this true story of William McKinley’s life can contend that he did not in 1876 see the imminence of that tariff struggle which culminated in 1880; nor that he failed in 1892 to see the need of a financial reform which 1896 should usher in; or that he underrated in 1898 the mighty consequences of that step which launched his people into a foreign war. It has been said that he, almost alone of Americans, stood for a protective tariff at the very close of the Civil War. Foreseeing that period of industrial development, he looked at the rolling oceans, and knew each billow would bear on its foamy back a load of goods for American markets; and that each departing ship would heap in its hold the dollars that Americans had paid for those goods. And he knew that, with such a policy, American development could never go beyond the bondman stage; that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” would indefinitely remain mortgaged to the lords of cheaper labor, the host of shrewder men. So from the first he struggled for a tariff rate which seemed small lessening of the burden that the war had left. Against the superficial charge of injustice he offered the defense of ultimate benefit, and if some of his countrymen were slow to see, let it be said to the credit of a majority that they followed him—not always seeing, but ever trusting until the crisis had passed.