Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/295

Rh Department, he would be instantly recalled.” Then I reached my hand over to President McKinley and said: “Permit me to take your hand on this. This is the best thing you have told me yet—that your Administration will not countenance anything of that kind.” He shook my hand vigorously and, with that hearty chest-swelling emphasis peculiar to him, he replied: “Ah, you may be sure there will be no jingo nonsense under my Administration. You need not borrow any trouble on that account.”

So we parted. I left him, on the whole, in a well satisfied mind. While, as to the tariff, we had reason to be prepared for the worst, the declarations he had made with regard to all other important questions were so explicit and unequivocal that we might hope for the best; and in the reports I gave to my friends about my conversation with the new President, I never failed to lay particular stress upon the assurance that no foreign adventure was thought of and that a strictly conservative policy was certain.

It is difficult to imagine my amazement when, a few weeks after this conversation had taken place, President McKinley sent to the Senate a treaty concluded with the Hawaiian Government providing for the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States. It was like a thunderclap from a clear sky. The matter had been arranged in entire secrecy. There had not been the slightest popular demand for such a treaty. No discussion in political circles or in the newspapers had foreshadowed the event. I wrote to some old friends in Washington inquiring whether they knew how this astounding change of the President's mind, if change of mind it was, had come about. Not one of them seemed able to furnish any explanation of the strange contrast of what President McKinley had said to me and what