NOTES AND INCIDENTS FROM LIFE: MEMORANDA FOR A HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF OUR FOURTH WAR PRESIDENT.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

Of the twenty-four different men who have been Presidents of the United States but four can be characterized as War Presidents. Washington, "first in war," was a peace President. His first term began in 1789, six years after the signing of the treaty which closed the Revolution. The first war waged by the United States was that of 1812, during the administration of James Madison. Then in 1846, when James K. Polk was President, came the 17-months' war with Mexico. Abraham Lincoln was the third War President. Eight peaceful

Copyright, 1898, by the S. S. MCCLURE Co. All rights reserved.

administrations followed, until in April of the present year the Spanish-American war broke out. Mr. McKinley is, then, our fourth War President. The present article attempts nothing more than to record certain impressions of the President as he appeared to those near him during the first trying days of the war crisis. It is in no sense an estimate; it is rather memoranda to aid in a future estimate.

The actual daily life of the Administration, as it is engaged in the business of making war, has inspired the illustrations of the article. Mr. Stevens's sketches were made in and about the White House, at Army Headquarters, and in the offices of the Navy Department. He has caught groups which the unusual conditions have made common at the seat of government, and has portrayed the leading actors in the great drama with a vigor and truthfulness that have rarely been equaled in off-hand portraiture. Miss Johnston's photographs have been made especially for the article under exceptional conditions, and have the same actuality. The frontispiece portrait of President McKinley himself, in addition to its general faithfulness as a likeness, has the added interest of special timeliness, since it was taken only a week or two ago expressly for use here.

after his inauguration, it is his skill in conducting a trying foreign complication and, when forced into a war, in meeting the emergencies of that situation, that has distinguished his term. It is undoubtedly as a War President that he will be known to history.

W HEN a man is elected President of the United States, it is with the expectation that he will devote himself to realizing the two or three central ideas of his party, with which he is supposed to be especially qualified to grapple. When he takes his oath of office, however, he inherits from his predecessor a budget of unfinished business, The war is not of Mr. McKinley's making. which, not infrequently, turns out to be The materials for it were all in his inherited more insistent than the platform on which budget of unfinished business a collection he came into office. President McKinley is of documents known to the public only an example in point. Elected on financial vaguely. It is possible that the country issues, there was every reason to suppose at large would never have realized the that his administration would occupy itself serious difficulties in the Cuban question principally with the money question and that to which Mr. McKinley fell heir if, nearly he would be known in history as the Sound Money President or the Protective Tariff President. No one thought of him as a War President. Yet to-day, fourteen months

a year after his inauguration and at a time when he himself believed he was on the road to a righteous settlement of the complications, a match had not been put to the

mass of dangerous papers which ever since he entered office he had been handling with the greatest caution.

It was between three and four o'clock on the morning of February 16th, that the President was awakened from sleep to be informed of the destruction of the battleship "Maine." An hour before, the Secretary of the Navy had been aroused by a cablegram from the commander of the "Maine," which for three weeks had been anchored, a friendly visitor, in the harbor of Havana. The commander announced that, at 9.40 o'clock on the evening of February 15th, his ship had been entirely destroyed by an explosion, and that it was supposed that many men were wounded and many killed. The Secretary of the Navy hurried the startling news to the White House. President McKinley at once dressed and went to his office, where he was soon joined by Secretary Long,