recommendations," he admitted, "I am fully alive to the responsibility
incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow."

The threat of war conveyed in the Message drove silver from the public
mind. Business was aghast, and judicious publicists either questioned
the value of the Monroe Doctrine or denied the propriety of its
application. The general public supported the President without
question, but many of his closest advisers turned against him. His
political enemies charged him with raising a foreign issue to reunite
his party, or with creating a scare to help his speculations in stocks.
Great Britain blustered in her press, but opened her archives to the
American Venezuelan Commission. In 1897 she allowed an arbitration to
take place, and the affair passed over.

Whatever Cleveland's motive in the Venezuela Message, it did not
establish more than a transient calm in either party. His own was doubly
split by silver and the tariff, while Republican plans for 1896 had
become badly deranged. That party had organized to play upon protection,
but found interest in its chosen subject silenced for the time.

In spite of its defeats in 1890 and 1892, the Republican organization
had kept up its fight for protection. Quay had in 1888 completed the
partnership between the manufacturers who had a cash interest in the
tariff and the Republican voters. In manufacturing communities the
doctrine had been accepted that prosperity and protection went together.
Ruin was prophesied if the Democrats should win. The panic of 1893
seemed to prove this, and when the Democrats passed the Wilson Bill the
Republicans asserted that the fear of this had caused the panic. In
private, the leaders agreed with the president of the Home Market Club,
who wrote in his memoirs, "The bill ... was much less destructive than
there was reason to fear." "Our business was not unprofitable during
these lean years, but much less profitable than it had been and ought to
have been." Prosperity was clearly lacking and to be desired, and among
the candidates for the nomination in 1896 was the author of the McKinley
Bill, in whom an Ohio cartoonist had discovered the "Advance Agent of
Prosperity."

Associated with the name of William McKinley, of Canton, Ohio, was that
of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a citizen of Cleveland who had acted on the
borderland between business and politics since 1880. Hanna had been
among the earliest to see the financial i