Ir will hardly be questioned that the chief interest of political history in the past two years has its centres in Great Britain and the United States. The question that is open to debate is whether the men charged with the direction of national policies have met the crisis wisely.
Lord Salisbury and Mr. MeKinl exercise, individually, wider powers than any other potentates of the world to-day. The British premier is the president of an imperial republic, and legally responsible only to a House of Commons, which it is in his power to dissolve. Mr. McKinley is the active premier of his advisory cabinet, and in matters of executive policy is practically irresponsible during the term for which he was elected. No executive in continental Europe possesses at once such freedom as these two men, and so wide'a sphere in which to exercise it. The German Em-error can act only through his chancellor. The prime minister of! the French Republic divides his powers with the President. sion of authority so unsatisfactory that it provoked the resignation of President Casimir-Périer. The Czar of all the Russias is the figure-head of a ruling class whose present policy of aggrandisement no peace rescript can restrain.
The positions occupied by Lord Salisbury and President McKinley offer unparalleled opportunities for leadership. The man who secs in advance what solution of a national problem will be approved by the sober after-judgment of an enlightened people, and who speaks and acts with firmness to this end while public sentiment is still plastic, is a leader of men. This is the constructive statesmanship of a Cavour or of a Bismarck. Such, in some respects, was the peculiar genius of Distacli; such, in an eminent degree, was the greatness of Lincoln.
Is President McKinley a leader? American sentiment has been divided on this question from the day when the news of the destruction of the Maine in Havana harbour was flashed over the country. 'The message to Congress which at last declared, "The war in Cuba must stop," was conspicuously wanting in any definite recommendation of a plan of intervention. As to the question of keeping the Philippine' Islands the president was at first non-com-mitral, then advocated holding them on grounds of international obligation and national destiny, a policy which "Mr. Dooley" satirically characterised as "making up our minds as we go along." On the other hand, it is maintained that the times do not require pre-eminent leadership in a president. Judge Emory Speer, one of the lights of the American forum, in a recent and widely-noted speech, declared that: "Ours are not the institutions nor these the times which require in the executive that startling and predominant superiority above his fellow-men which compels undeviating pursuit of what are termed polloi The policy of Lord Salisbury in conducting, or in failing to conduct, the negotiations which ended in a gigantic war in South Africa, has been similarly debated. But we are now concerned with a problem closer at hand. The solution of what Mr. Stead calls the Chinese puzzle
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.