Only Seward and John Quincy Adams can rival John Hay as successful American Ministers of Foreign Affairs. Born in the Middle West in 1838, Hay served in Lincoln's household as a private secretary throughout the Civil War. He held minor appointments after this and alternated diplomatic experience with literary production. The monumental _Life of Abraham Lincoln_ was partly his work. His graceful verse gained for him a wide reading. His anonymous novel, _The Breadwinners_, was an important document in the early labor movement. McKinley sent him to London as Ambassador in 1897, following the tradition that only the best in the United States may go to the Court of St. James, and had recalled him to be Secretary of State in the fall of 1898. The Boxer outbreak in China in 1900 gave the first opening to the new diplomacy of the United States, broadened out of its insularity by the Spanish War and interested in the attainment of international ideas. Hay led in the adjustment which settled the Chinese claims, opened the door of China to the commerce of the world, and prevented her dismemberment. He was still engaged in this correspondence when President McKinley was murdered by an anarchist, and Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States, September 14, 1901. In the hurried inaugural ceremony held in the Buffalo residence in which McKinley died, Roosevelt declared his intention to continue the term as his predecessor had begun it. He insisted that all the members of the Cabinet should remain with him, as they did for considerable periods. He took up the work where it had been dropped, and for some months it was not apparent that a change had been made from a party administration to a personal administration. The suave and cordial tolerance of McKinley was succeeded by the aggressive certainty of his successor. Through John Hay's skillful hand this new tone made a deeper impression on the politics of the world than had that of any President since Washington gave forth the doctrine of neutrality.