a teacher in Canton, Stark county, Ohio, he began his law practice in that place, which was to be his permanent home. He identified himself immediately with the Republican party, campaigned in the Democratic county of Stark in favour of negro suffrage in 1867, and took part in the campaign work on behalf of Grant’s presidential candidature in 1868. In the following year he was elected prosecuting attorney on the Republican ticket; in 1871 he failed of re-election by 45 votes, and again devoted himself to his profession, while not relaxing his interest in politics.

In 1875 he first became known as an able campaign speaker by his speeches favouring the resumption of specie payments, and in behalf of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio. In 1876 he was elected by a majority of 3304 to the national House of Representatives. Conditions both in Ohio and in Congress had placed him, and were to keep him for twenty years, in an attitude of aggressive and uncompromising partisanship. His Congressional district was naturally Democratic, and its boundaries were changed two or three times by Democratic legislatures for the purpose of so grouping Democratic strongholds as to cause his defeat. But he overcame what had threatened to be adverse majorities on all occasions from 1876 to 1890, with the single exception of 1882, when, although he received a certificate of election showing that he had been re-elected by a majority of 8, and although he served nearly through the long session of 1883-1884, his seat was contested and taken (May 28, 1884) by his Democratic opponent, Jonathan H. Wallace. McKinley reflected the strong sentiment of his manufacturing constituency in behalf of a high protective tariff, and he soon became known in Congress (where he particularly attracted the attention of James G. Blaine) as one of the most diligent students of industrial policy and question affecting national taxation. In 1878 he took part in the debates over the Wood Tariff Bill, proposing lower import duties; and in the same year he voted for the Bland-Allison Silver Bill. In December 1880 he was appointed a member of the Ways and Means committee, succeeding General James A. Garfield, who had been elected president in the preceding month, and to whose friendship, as to that of Rutherford B. Hayes, McKinley owed much in his earlier years in Congress. He was prominent in the debate which resulted in the defeat of the Democratic Morrison Tariff Bill in 1884, and, as minority leader of the Ways and Means committee, in the defeat of the Mills Bill for the revision of the tariff in 1887-1888. In 1889 he became chairman of the Ways and Means committee and Republican leader in the House of Representatives, after having been defeated by Thomas B. Reed on the third ballot in the Republican caucus for speaker of the House. On the 16th of April 1890 he introduced from the Ways and Means committee the tariff measure known commonly as the McKinley Bill, which passed the House on the 21st of May, passed the Senate (in an amended form, with a reciprocity clause, which McKinley had not been able to get through the House) on the 10th of September, was passed as amended, by the House, and was approved by the president on the 1st of October 1890. The McKinley Bill reduced revenues by its high and in many cases almost prohibitive duties; it put sugar on the free list with a discriminating duty of 1⁄10th of one cent a pound on sugar imported from countries giving a bounty for sugar exported, and it gave bounties to American sugar growers; it attempted to protect many “infant” industries such as the manufacture of tin-plate; under its provision for reciprocal trade agreements (a favourite project of James G. Blaine, who opposed many of the “protective” features of the Bill) reciprocity treaties were made with Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium, which secured a market in those countries for American pork. Abroad, where the Bill made McKinley’s name known everywhere, there was bitter opposition to it and reprisals were threatened by several European states. In the United States the McKinley Tariff Bill was one of the main causes of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections of 1890, in which McKinley himself was defeated by an extraordinary Democratic gerrymander of his Congressional district. In November 1891 he was elected governor of Ohio with a plurality of more than 21,000 votes in a total of 795,000 votes cast. He was governor of Ohio in 1892-1895, being re-elected in 1893. His administration was marked by no important events, except that he had on several occasions in his second term to call out the militia of the state to preserve order; but it may be considered important because of the training it gave him in executive as distinguished from legislative work.

McKinley had been prominent in national politics even before the passage of the tariff measure bearing his name. In 1888 in the National Republican Convention in Chicago he was chairman of the committee on resolutions (i.e. the platform committee) and was leader of the delegation from Ohio, which had been instructed for John Sherman; after James G. Blaine withdrew his name there was a movement, begun by Republican congressmen, to nominate McKinley, who received 16 votes on the seventh ballot, but passionately refused to be a candidate, considering that his acquiescence would be a breach of faith toward Sherman. In 1892 McKinley was the permanent president of the National Republican Convention which met in Minneapolis and which renominated Benjamin Harrison on the first ballot, on which James G. Blaine received 1825⁄6 votes, and McKinley, in spite of his efforts to the contrary, received 182 votes. In 1894 he made an extended campaign tour before the Congressional elections, and spoke even in the South. In 1896 he seemed for many reasons the most “available” candidate of his party for the presidency: he had no personal enemies in the party; he had carried the crucial state of Ohio by a large majority in 1893; his attitude on the coinage question had never been so pronounced as to make him unpopular either with the radical silver wing or with the conservative “gold-standard” members of the party. The campaign for his nomination was conducted with the greatest adroitness by his friend, Marcus A. Hanna, and in the National Republican Convention held in St Louis in June he was nominated for the presidency on the first ballot by 6611⁄2 out of a total of 906 votes. The convention adopted a tariff plank drafted by McKinley, and, of far greater immediate importance, a plank, which declared that the Republican party was “opposed to the free coinage of silver, except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world, which we pledge ourselves to promote, and until such agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be preserved.” This “gold standard” plank drove out of the Republican party the Silver Republicans of the West, headed by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado. The Republican convention nominated for the vice-presidency Garrett A. Hobart of New Jersey. The National Democratic Convention declared for the immediate opening of the mints to the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio with gold of 16 to 1; and it nominated for the presidency William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who also received the nomination of the People’s party and of the National Silver party. There was a secession from the Democratic party of conservatives who called themselves the National Democratic party, who were commonly called Gold Democrats, and who nominated John M. Palmer (1817-1900) of Illinois for president. In this re-alignment of parties McKinley, who had expected to make the campaign on the issue of a high protective tariff, was diverted to the defence of the gold standard as the main issue. While