For the reasons I have already given in my chapter on the Governorship
of New York, the Republican party, which in the days of Abraham Lincoln
was founded as the radical progressive party of the Nation, had been
obliged during the last decade of the nineteenth century to uphold
the interests of popular government against a foolish and illjudged
mock-radicalism. It remained the Nationalist as against the
particularist or State's rights party, and in so far it remained
absolutely sound; for little permanent good can be done by any party
which worships the State's rights fetish or which fails to regard the
State, like the county or the municipality, as merely a convenient unit
for local self-government, while in all National matters, of importance
to the whole people, the Nation is to be supreme over State, county, and
town alike. But the State's rights fetish, although still effectively
used at certain times by both courts and Congress to block needed
National legislation directed against the huge corporations or in the
interests of workingmen, was not a prime issue at the time of which I
speak. In 1896, 1898, and 1900 the campaigns were waged on two great
moral issues: (1) the imperative need of a sound and honest currency;
(2) the need, after 1898, of meeting in manful and straightforward
fashion the extraterritorial problems arising from the Spanish War.
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