and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and
Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate,
if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to
himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.

The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion
for this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of
Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of
the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary
in foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union and
peace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy
plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient
history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of
extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied
equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went down
in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago
and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief
Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side
he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared
that no Southerner could he prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at the
head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out
the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,
a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of