896 he was deeply distressed at the country having to choose for
President between the arch-protectionist McKinley and the free-silver
advocate Bryan, for he had spent a good part of his life combating a
protective tariff and advocating sound money. Though the _Evening Post_
contributed powerfully to the election of McKinley, from the fact that
its catechism, teaching financial truths in a popular form, was
distributed throughout the West in immense quantities by the chairman of
the Republican National Committee, Godkin himself refused to vote for
McKinley and put in his ballot for Palmer, the gold Democrat.[200]

The Spanish-American war seems to have destroyed any lingering hope that
he had left for the future of American democracy. He spoke of it as "a
perfectly avoidable war forced on by a band of unscrupulous politicians"
who had behind them "a roaring mob."[201] The taking of the Philippines
and the subsequent war in these islands confirmed him in his despair. In
a private letter written from Paris, he said, "American ideals were the
intellectual food of my youth, and to see America converted into a
senseless, Old-World conqueror, embitters my age."[202] To another he
wrote that his former "high and fond ideals about America were now all
shattered."[203] "Sometimes he seemed to feel," said his intimate
friend, James Bryce, "as though he had labored in vain for forty
years."[204]

Such regrets expressed by an honest and sincere man with a high ideal
must command our respectful attention. Though due in part to old age and
enfeebled health, they are still more attributable to his
disappointment that the country had not developed in the way that he
had marked out for her. For with men of Godkin's positive convictions,
there is only one way to salvation. Sometimes such men are true
prophets; at other times, while they see clearly certain aspects of a
case, their narrowness of vision prevents them from taking in the whole
range of possibilities, especially when the enthusiasm of manhood is
gone.

Godkin took a broader view in 1868, which he forcibly expressed in a
letter to the London _Daily News_. "There is no careful and intelligent
observer," he wrote, "whether he be a friend to democracy or not, who
can help admiring the unbroken power with which the popular common
sense--that shrewdness, or intelligence, or instinct of
self-preservation, I care not what you call it, which so often makes the
American farmer a far