An American may judge his own country best from European soil, impregnated as he there is with European ideas. Twice have I been in Europe during Cleveland's administration, twice during McKinley's, once during Roosevelt's. During the natural process of comparison, when one must recognize in many things the distinct superiority of England, Germany, and France, I have never had a feeling other than high respect for each one of these Presidents; and taking it by and large, in the endeavor to consider fairly the hits and misses of all, I have never had any reason to feel that the conduct of our national government has been inferior to that of any one of these highly civilized powers. [164] Henry Adams, II, 113. [165] _Ibid._, 130. [166] Sumner's Jackson, 138. [167] Twenty Years of Congress, II, 185. [168] July 14, 1900. [169] See also the _Federalist_ (Lodge's edition), 452. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 308. [170] American Commonwealth, I, 80. A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES'S ADMINISTRATION Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate Schools of Applied Science and Business Administration, Harvard University, on October 8, 1908; printed in the _Century Magazine_ for October, 1909. A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES'S ADMINISTRATION Many of our Presidents have been inaugurated under curious and trying circumstances, but no one of them except Hayes has taken the oath of office when there was a cloud on his title. Every man who had voted for Tilden,--whose popular vote exceeded that of Hayes by 264,000,--believed that Hayes had reached his high place by means of fraud. Indeed, some of the Hayes voters shared this belief, and stigmatized as monstrous the action of the Louisiana returning board in awarding the electoral vote of Louisiana to Hayes. The four men, three of them dishonest and the fourth incompetent, who constituted this returning board, rejected, on the ground of intimidation of negro voters, eleven thousand votes that had been cast in due form for Tilden. In the seventh volume of my history I have told the story of the compromise in the form of the Electoral Commission which passed on the conflicting claims and adjudged the votes of the disputed states, notably Florida and Louisiana, to Hayes, giving him a majority of one in the electoral college, thus making him President. When the count was completed and the usual declaration made, Hayes had no choice but to abide by the decision. Duty to his country and to his party, the Republican, required his acceptance of the office, and there is no reason for thinking that he had any doubts regarding his proper course. His legal title was perfect, but his moral title was unsound, and it added to the difficulty of his situation that the opposition, the Democrats, had a majority in the House of Representatives. None but a determined optimist could have predicted