Excerpt from Speech of Hon.: George F. Hoar in the Senate of the United States, April
From all over the country came the voice of well-paid labor, dwelling in happy homes, full of contentment with the present and of hope for the future. Capital was seeking new investments on all sides. Our domestic market, rescued from foreign invasion, was our own. Foreign markets were opening. The balance of trade was on our side. The product of American industry was carried abroad on an overwhelming and increasing tide.
We had won the glory of a great liberator in both hemispheres. The flag of Spain - emblem of tyranny and cruelty - had been driven from the Western Hemisphere, and was soon to go down from her eastern possessions. The war had been conducted without the loss of a gun or the capture of an American soldier in battle. The glory of this great achievement was unlike any other which history has recorded. It was not that we had beaten Spain. It was not that 75,000,000 people had conquered 15,000,000. Not that the spirit of the nineteenth century had been too much for the spirit 01 the fifteenth century. Not that the young athlete had felled to the ground a decrepit old man of ninety. It was not that the American mechanic and engineer in the machine shop could make better ships or better guns; or that the American soldier or sailor had displayed the same quality in battle that he had shown on every field - at Bunker Hill, at Yorktown, at Lundys Lane, at New Orleans, at Buena Vista, at Gettysburg; in every sea fight on Lake Erie or on the Atlantic. Nobody doubted the skill of the American general, the gallantry of the American admiral, or the courage of the American soldier or sailor. The glory of the war and of the victory was that it was a war and a victory in the interest of liberty. The American flag had appeared as a liberator in both hemispheres; when it floated over Havana or Santiago or Manila, there was written on its folds, where all nations could read it, the pledge of the resolution of Congress and the declaration of the President.
Every true American thanked God that he had lived to behold that day. The rarest good fortune of all was the good fortune of President McKinley. He was, in my judgment, the best beloved President who ever sat in the chair of Washington. His name was inseparably connected with two periods of unexampled prosperity, made more impressive by the period of calamity which came between them. The people believed that to the great measure called by his name was due a time of happiness and comfort never equaled in this country, and never approached by any other. It was the high-water mark on this planet of everything that could bring happiness to a people. But high as the tide reached then, it went still higher under the operation of the policies which came in with his Administration.
He had won golden honors by his patriotic hesitation in bringing on the war, and by his interpretation of the purpose with which the people at last entered upon it.
When I say that President McKinley was the best beloved President that ever sat in the chair of Washington, I do not mean, of course, to compare the reverence in which any living man is held with that which attends the memory of Washington or Lincoln. But Washington and Lincoln encountered while they were alive a storm of political hostility, which President McKinley has fortunately been spared. I repeat that it seems to me that President McKinley holds a place in the affection of the people at large which no one of his predecessors ever attained in his lifetime.
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