Betty, who had come justly to the conclusion that she knew something of
politics after a year's application to the science and several object
lessons, made in the following weeks her first acquaintance with the
intricacies which sometimes may involve political motives. The
President was not given time to exhaust diplomacy with Spain, although
in his War Message he was obliged to state that he had done so. To deal
successfully with a proud and mediaeval country required months, not
days, and as Spain had grudgingly but surely yielded all along the line
to the demands of the United States, it is safe to assume that she
would have withdrawn peacefully her forces from Cuba if her pride could
have been saved. Sagasta was working in the interests of peace; but a
bigoted old country, too indolent to read history, and puzzled at a
youthful nation's industry in the cause of humanity, would move so fast
and no faster.
The President was rushed off his feet and his hand was forced. An
honest but delirious country was threatening impeachment and clamouring
for war. Its representatives were hammering on the doors of the White
House and shrieking in Congress. A dishonest press was inflaming it and
injuring it in the eyes of the world by assaulting the integrity of the
Executive and of the leading men in both Houses; and unscrupulous
politicians were extracting every possible party advantage, until it
looked as if the Democratic party, rent asunder by Mr. Bryan and his
doctrines, would be unified once more. The House, after the President's
calm and impersonal message on the _Maine_ report, acted like a
mutinous school of bad boys who had not been taught the first
principles of breeding and dignity; the few gentlemen in it hardly
tried to make themselves heard, and even the Speaker was powerless to
quell a couple of hundred tempers all rampant at once. Every
conceivable insult was heaped upon the head of the President as he
delayed his War Message from day to day, hoping against hope, and
gaining what time he could to strengthen the Navy.
It became necessary therefore for the high-class men in the Senate,
particularly the Republicans, to present an unbroken front. Whatever
the conclusions of the President, they must stand by him. It was their
duty as Americans first and Republicans after; for they had elected him
to the high and representative office he filled, they were responsible
for him, he had done nothing to forfeit their confidence, and
everything, by his wise and conservative course, to win their approval.
And it was their duty to their party to uphold him, for internal
dissensions in this great crisis would weaken their forces and play
them into the hands of the Democrats. Therefore, Senator North and
others, who had strenuously and consistently opposed war from any
cause, until it became evident that the President had been elbowed into
the position of a puppet by his people instead of being permitted to
guide them, withdrew their opposition, and when his Message finally was
forced from his hand, let it be known that they should support it
against the powerful faction in the Senate which demanded the
recognition of Cuba as a Republic. The Message meant war, but a war
that no longer could be averted, and there was nothing left for any
high-minded statesman and loyal party man to do but to defend the
President from those who would usurp his authority and tie his hands,
to demonstrate to the world their belief in a statesmanship which was
being attacked at every point by those whom his Message had
disappointed, and to provide against one future embarrassment the more.
When Betty had trodden the maze this far, she realized the unenviable
position of the conservative faction in the Senate. North's position
was particularly unpleasant. He had stood to the country as the
embodiment of its conservative spirit, the spirit which was opposed
uncompromisingly to this war. Several days before the speech of the
Senator from Vermont exploded the inflamed nervous system of the
country, he had made an address which had been copied in every State in
the Union and been hopefully commented on abroad. In this speech, which
was a passionless, impersonal, and judicial argument against
interference in the domestic affairs of a friendly nation seeking to
put down an insurgent population whose record for butchery and crime
equalled her own, as well as a brilliant forecast of the evils, foreign
and domestic, which must follow such a war, he demonstrated that if war
was declared at this period it would be unjustifiable because it would
be the direct result of the accident to the _Maine_, which, as the
explosion could not be traced to the Spanish officials, was not a
_casus belli_. Prior to that accident no important or considerable
number of the American people had clamoured for war, only for according
belligerent rights to the Cubans, which measure they were not wise
enough to see would lead to war. Therefore, had the _Maine_ incident
not occurred, the President would have been given the necessary time
for successful diplomacy, despite the frantic efforts of the press and
the loud-voiced minority; and it could not be claimed that the present
clamour, dating from the fifteenth of February, was honestly in behalf
of the suffering Cuban. It was for revenge, and it was an utterly
unreasonable demand for revenge, as no sane man believed that Spain had
seized the first opportunity to cut her throat; and until it could be
proved that she had done so, it was a case for indemnity, not for war.
Therefore, if war came at the present juncture it was because the
people of the United States had made up their minds they wanted a
fight, they would have a fight, they didn't care whether they had an
excuse or not.
The speech made a profound impression even in the agitated state of the
public mind, for bitterly as North might be denounced he always was
listened to. The press lashed itself into a fury and wrote head-lines
which would have ridden its editors into prison had the country
possessed libel laws adequate to protect a noble provision of the
Constitution. The temperate men in the country had been with North from
the beginning, but the excited millions excoriated him the more loudly.
He was denounced at public banquets and accused by excited citizens all
over the Union, except in his own State, of every depravity, from
holding an unimaginable number of Spanish bonds to taking a ferocious
pleasure in the sufferings of the reconcentrados.
And in the face of this he must cast his vote for war.
A weaker man would have held stubbornly to his position, made notorious
by his personality, and a less patriotic have chosen the satisfaction
of being consistent to the bitter end and winning some measure of
approval from the unthinking.
But North was a statesman, and although Betty did not see him to speak
to for many weeks after the Message went to Congress, she doubted if he
had hesitated a moment in choosing his course. He was a man who made a
problem of nothing, who thought and acted promptly on all questions
great and small. It was his manifest duty to support his President, who
was also the head of his party, and to do what he could to win the
sympathy of Europe for his country by making its course appear the
right and inevitable one.
North's position was the logical result of the deliberations and
decisions of the year 1787. Hamilton, the greatest creative and
constructive genius of his century, never so signally proved his
far-sighted statesmanship as when he pleaded for an aristocratic
republic with a strong centralized government. As he was capable of
anything, he doubtless foresaw the tyranny of the people into which
ill-considered liberty would degenerate, just as he foresaw the many
strong, wise, and even great men who would be born to rule the country
wisely if given the necessary power. If the educated men of the country
knew that its destinies were wholly in their hands, and that they alone
could achieve the highest honours, there is not one of them who would
not train himself in the science of government. Such men, ruling a
country in which liberty did not mean a heterogeneous monarchy, would
make the lot of the masses far easier than it is to-day. The fifteen
million Irish plebeians with which the country is cursed would be
harmlessly raising pigs in the country. Hamilton, in one of his
letters, speaks of democracy as a poison. Some twenty years ago an
eminent Englishman bottled and labelled the poison in its infinite
variety, as a warning to the extreme liberals in his own country. We
attempted one ideal, and we almost have forgotten what the ideal was.
Hamilton's could not have fared worse, and there is good reason to
believe that educated and thinking men, unhampered by those who talk
bad grammar and think not, would have raised our standards far higher
than they are, even with men like North patiently and dauntlessly
striving to counteract the poison below. At all events, there would be
no question of a President's hand being forced. Nor would such a class
of rulers put a man in the White House whose hand could be forced.
Although Betty knew North would disregard the sneers of the press and
of ambitious orators who would declaim while cannon thundered, she also
knew that his impassive exterior hid a sense of humiliating defeat, and
that the moment in which he was obliged to utter his aye for war would
be the bitterest of his life. She fancied that he forgot her in these
days, but she was willing to have it so. The intense breathless
excitement of that time, when scarcely a Senator left his seat from ten
in the morning till some late hour of the night, except to snatch a
meal; the psychological effect of the silent excited crowds in the
galleries and corridors of the Capitol and on its lawns and the
immensity of its steps; the solemnity and incalculable significance of
the approaching crisis, and the complete gravity of the man who
possessed her mind, carried her out of herself and merged her
personality for a brief while into the great personality of the nation.