So significant a victory won for the young man the attention of the nation; and the arrival in Washington of this strong, courageous champion of a great public policy was occasion for gratulation among the men who saw beyond the immediate present, and were building for the future of the nation—preparing the Republic for that day when it must abandon its hermitage, and take place among the mighty nations of the earth. And they gave him every encouragement. But even they—even Judge Kelley, of Pennsylvania, whose protectionism was less genuine because more a matter of personal interest—found at the very beginning that they could give William McKinley nothing, and that they would shortly be asking favors of him. Sociologists may interest themselves with speculations on the influences which contributed to William McKinley’s success as a statesman. But it is doubtful if they find anything more significant than the sorrow which came to him at this period. His two daughters were dead. His wife had suffered the blow from which she was never to recover; and this man’s entry upon national legislation was through the gates of a great sorrow. Maybe it refined him, and purified his nature of whatever dross it contained. Maybe it intensified his thought, and added the sense of a sacred responsibility to him as a public man. He had no children. He knew he never again would hear the lisping call of “Father.” And in the holy bereavement of that hour, he must—perhaps unconsciously—have devoted himself to the service of his country. There was no need to “trim,” to— “Crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, That thrift might follow fawning.” He had but one ambition now, and that was so to live as a public man that the verdict of the nation might be: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” That first term in Congress was judiciously utilized by William McKinley. He knew, with that prescience which belongs to the truly great, that this was his field, that he would return to it, that no small considerations of oppositions and repeated elections could keep him from the fulfillment of that duty, the discharge of that task, for which all his life had been but preparation. In the first session he made no speech. He was not even on a committee of importance. But his known position as a protectionist made him a man to be consulted, and his quickly recognized ability made him—a first termer—share in the shaping of legislation. That was a Democratic Congress, with Samuel J. Randall in the speaker’s chair. And the young man from Ohio waited at the portals of opportunity, making himself ready for the day when they should open and admit him.