In the years which intervened between the events last narrated, the Democratic president, with regard to whom Dr. Washington had asserted that he possessed no color prejudice, had concluded his second term, made illustrious by the firm stand taken by him in the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute, which had been brought to his attention and fought to a decision,[286] against the extreme and arbitrary claims of Great Britain, by that almost forgotten Southerner, William L. Scruggs of Georgia. Yet, despite the cloud in which this absolutely proper stand for justice between nations and maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine involved him for awhile, on account of the belittling comments of Anglophiles, Cleveland has passed into history as a strong president and a great man. He was succeeded in his high office by the gentlest mannered and sweetest tempered individual who has ever exhibited in such station the high personal traits which adorned the character of William McKinley. Whatever these two men thought concerning the color question was no doubt discoverable; but it was not announced as a new gospel; for while great in spirit they were not noisily so. They were both great men. Cleveland, the Democrat, was greater in his public character and official achievements, the Republican, McKinley, in the personal integrity and absolute self abnegation which adorned his life and crowned his end. Cleveland opposed to malfeasance a rugged force, which did much to build up public integrity, lamentably lowered in Grant’s two terms. McKinley’s respect for law and order was so sincere, that in his dying moments he interposed to protect his assassin from the natural fury of the mob, thereby defending an anarchist from the outburst of anarchy which the vile deed occasioned, and giving, in his own suffering person, so interposing, the noblest appeal that could possibly be made against lynching. The executive who succeeded McKinley was essentially different. No president of the United States has done as much as Mr. Roosevelt to wipe out distinctions between white and black. That he should have estranged Southern whites is not unnatural; that he should have aroused the enmity of Northern and Southern colored men discloses to what an extent the Negro is amenable to impulse rather than reason. Mr. Alfred Holt Stone has discussed three incidents which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s first term. Benjamin Brawley, a colored man, discusses the even more important incident which occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s second term. In the first three Mr. Roosevelt held the centre of the stage, in the fourth, the Negroes were the actors, Mr. Roosevelt only responding. Mr. Stone treats the first three, in part, as follows: