INTRODUCTION. The campaign of this year is of unusual importance. The issues are as serious as any that have been presented to the American people since the close of the civil war. They involve not only domestic questions of great importance but also questions as to the relations of this government to the rest of the world. On the result of the next national election may hang the future of this government. We have again come to the parting of the ways and must choose our course, whether it shall be expansion or contraction. The American voters must decide whether they will stand by the verdict of the war with Spain and the treaty of peace or abandon both. They must decide whether they will go forward or retrace their steps. They must decide whether they will retain the Philippines or throw them, an apple of discord, before the nations of Europe to produce, possibly, a general war involving the civilized world and finally dragging this nation into it. They must decide whether they want the nation to protect its growing markets in the far East or abandon them. These are serious questions. The voters must decide whether they will uphold the verdict of four years ago, in favor of honest money which will be recognized the world over as good for its face value, or overturn that verdict and adopt a debased silver currency. They must decide what is to be the standard of value in this country,—gold or silver. The issue is made and now only the voters can decide. They must decide whether they want to continue the prosperity which has smiled upon them during this administration or go back to the uncertainty of a revolution in the political control and economic policy of the government. These questions are important and call for serious consideration by every man who will go to the polls and vote his judgment and preference in November. It has been the boast of the American people that they are freest and most independent and most enlightened in the world. This has not been an idle boast. It has been accepted as true by the civilized world. There is no other country where suffrage is so free and universal as in the United States. The words of Lincoln are true. This is "a government of the people, for the people and by the people." The voters make the government. It is theirs. They can by the will of the majority decide every question at issue in this campaign. They have the power to uphold or defeat the present administration, to sustain or undo everything it has done. Our elections were never so free as now. With the Australian ballot system in nearly every state, every voter has his suffrage free from dictation by any other man, or set of men. On election day every man is master. He can and should do as his judgment wills. He has the privilege and the duty and he also has the responsibility. Every man owes it to himself and his fellows to consider and understand what he would have the government do in the next four years before he casts his vote. This volume is presented with the honest purpose of assisting the voters to an understanding of the Republican side of these issues, by giving their history and the purposes behind them. The attempt has been to go to the record and judge the future by the past. Neither men nor parties can stand on their record of past work alone, but their record is the best indication of their ability and readiness to carry out promises. Both great political parties have a record. The Republican party has for its record the political control of the government through its period of greatest moral and material development. The conscience of the American people has been awakened to the iniquity of slavery and. polygamy, twin relics of barbarism, and these have been wiped off the page of American history since the Republican party came into control of the government. There has been more recognition given to the rights of the individual man by legislation in the past forty years than in any other period of our history. There has also been more attention given to the material upbuilding of the American people in this period than in any other. This record may not belong to the Republican party alone, but it was made under Republican administration and that party has a right to be judged by it. In considering the issues of this campaign it is important to consider the practical as well as the sentimental side of every question. The Republican record is one of practical achievement, not alone of sentimental protest. The party has considered the practical way of securing results. In this it has followed the example of the Fathers of the Republic. Phrases are not always the best definition of great principles. Some of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence in which they declared that all men are created free and equal, owned slaves, and Jefferson, the author of the Constitution, held slaves. This fact did not destroy the force of the famous declaration, but it does de tract from the use of these phrases in argument against the practical control of great questions thrust upon the government. The record of accomplishment in the line of general principles is a better criterion than the phrases of men or parties. In presenting the Republican side of the issues of this campaign the writer has therefore gone to the record of results as better guidance for the honest voter, than to the declarations which have been made. Phrase making is as easy as lying. The nation has marched forward under Republican control until it stands to-day in the front rank of the world powers. It stands first in its record of development in industrial, financial, military and moral achievements. It stands first in the contest for industrial development, able to hold its own in the markets of the world. It stands first in its financial achievements in raising loans from its own people, and in selling the lowest interest-bearing bonds at par. It stands first in its military achievements and without a standing army. Its militarism is patriotism, and it has its illustration in the achievements of American patriots from Bunker Hill to Yorktown; from Fort Sumter to Appomattox; from Santiago to Manila Bay; and from Manila to Tien-Tsin. These are all the achievements of a citizen soldiery, the only militarism ever known under the United States flag. There never has been a standing army that equaled one soldier to one thousand inhabitants, and there never has been an army fighting under the American flag for a selfish purpose. Our appeals to arms have been in the cause of great moral and human principles. It is well for the voter to go to the record rather than to the catch phrase, invented to create sectional and partisan hatred in such matters. The campaign now begun is on great principles of government control-issues that affect every man in every walk of life. The issues in the campaign should therefore be considered in calm judgment and not in partisan passion. A campaign book for all the voters of the country should therefore be a calm and dispassionate discussion of these issues. The writer of the following pages has sought to follow this rule, and while discussing the issues of the campaign, recognize that he is writing for Democrat and Populist readers as well as Republicans. It is easier to follow this rule in this campaign than it would have been in some of the preceding national campaigns for two reasons: First, the issues are partisan only in the principles which the different parties have embodied in their platform, and Republicans, Democrats, and Pop ulists in the past will at the coming election vote as they believe in these principles, rather than because they are bound by partisanship to follow the party flag they have followed in the past. Second, because the Republican candidate, President McKinley, has in all his public life followed this rule of discussing principles rather than men. He has never uttered a word of partisan hatred in all his public expressions and in his social life has held men of all parties as his most devoted personal friends. His life has been given to public affairs with such devotion to what he believed to be the best interests of the whole people, that he has always been invulnerable against personal attack and freer from personal criticism than any other man in public life. The record of Mr. Roosevelt, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, has been one of work almost wholly beyond partisan lines, and without partisan hatred. With these two men as leaders, and the platform on which they stand in this campaign, it is more appropriate and a more pleasant task to follow their example and discuss the issues before the people, without passion or partisanship in its narrow sense. The writer has sought to appeal to reason without rhetoric. L. W. B. |