The records show that William McKinley, Jr., enlisted as a private in Company E of the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry on June 11, 1861; that he was promoted to commissary sergeant on April 15, 1862; that he was promoted to Second Lieutenant of Company D on September 23, 1862; that he was promoted to First Lieutenant of Company E on February 7, 1863; that he was promoted to Captain of Company G on July 25, 1864; that he was detailed as Acting Assistant Adjutant General of the First Division, First Army Corps, on the staff of General Carroll; that he was brevetted Major on March 13, 1865, and that he was mustered out of service on July 26, 1865. “For gallant and meritorious services at the battles of Opequan, Cedar Creek and Fisher’s Hill,” reads the document commissioning young McKinley as Brevet Major, signed “A. Lincoln.” This is the brief statement of four years of such activity as are hardly comprehensible by the sedate citizen in these “piping times of peace;” but they were years which tried and tested the material of which William McKinley was formed, and years in which that symmetrical development of his whole being went majestically on. As it ripened and quickened his judgment, teaching him self-confidence and the power of rallying resources; as it planted deep in his nature the love of country and the sense of sacrifice which proves all patriotism; as it brought him into closer communion with his fellow men in camp and battle, on the march or in the agonies of the field hospital—so it developed the physical powers of the vigorous young man. He has since said, looking at some photographs of himself, taken at the time of his enlistment: “I was, indeed, a raw recruit.” And he was. The portrait shows him rather slender, and with features which indicate a certain delicacy and refinement which were far from the appearance of the ideal soldier of books—the powerful frame, the flashing eye, the weather-beaten cheeks “bearded like a pard.” And yet he stood that day of his enlistment, a raw recruit, as the type of millions of his countrymen, as the expression of the best that was in the nation either for peace or war. And the four years of his slow advance to a major’s commission was the most necessary and the most valuable process of development that could possibly have come.