in popular sentiment regarding the tariff laws of the United States and is the more remarkable as coming from the foremost champion for years of a form of tariff legislation devised to stifle international competition. His apparently inconsistent record on the coinage question becomes consistent if considered in the same way, as the expression of the gradually changing views of his constituency. And it may not be fanciful to suggest that the obvious growth of McKinley in breadth and power during his term as president was due to his being the representative of a larger constituency, less local and less narrow-minded. He was an able but far from brilliant campaign speaker. His greatest administrative gift was a fine intuition in choosing men to serve him. McKinley’s private life was irreproachable; and very fine was his devotion to his wife, Ida Saxton (d. 1907), whom he had married in Canton in 1871, who was throughout his political career a confirmed invalid. He was from his early manhood a prominent member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
His Speeches and Addresses were printed in two volumes (New York, 1893 and 1901).
McKINNEY, a city and the county-seat of Collin county, Texas, U.S.A., about 30 m. N. by E. of Dallas. Pop. (1890),
2489; (1900), 4342 (917 negroes); (1910) 4714. It is served
by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas and the Houston & Texas
Central railways, and by the Dallas & Sherman inter-urban
(electric) line, the central power plant of which is immediately
north of the city. McKinney is in a fine farming region; there
are also manufactures. The municipal water supply is obtained
from artesian wells. The first settlement in Collin county was made about 10 m. north of what is now McKinney in 1841. McKinney was named, as was the county, in honour of Collin McKinney, a pioneer in the region and a signer of the Declaration of the Independence of Texas. It was settled in 1844, was laid out and became the county-seat in 1846, and was first chartered as a city in 1874.
MACKINTOSH, SIR JAMES (1765–1832), Scottish publicist, was born at Aldourie, 7 m. from Inverness, on the 24th of October
1765. He came of old Highland families on both sides. He
went in 1780 to college at Aberdeen, where he made a friend
of Robert Hall, afterwards the famous preacher. In 1784 he
proceeded for the study of medicine to Edinburgh, where he
participated to the full in the intellectual ferment, but did
not quite neglect his medical studies, and took his degree in
1787.
In 1788 Mackintosh removed to London, then agitated by the trial of Warren Hastings and the king’s first lapse into insanity. He was much more interested in these and other political events than in his professional prospects; and his attention was specially directed to the events and tendencies which caused or preceded the Revolution in France. In 1789 he married his first wife, Catherine Stuart, whose brother Daniel afterwards became editor of the Morning Post. His wife’s prudence was a corrective to his own unpractical temperament, and his efforts in journalism became fairly profitable. Mackintosh was soon absorbed in the question of the time; and in April 1791, after long meditation, he published his Vindiciae Gallicae, a reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. It was the only worthy answer to Burke that appeared. It placed the author in the front rank of European publicists, and won him the friendship of some of the most distinguished men of the time, including Burke himself. The success of the Vindiciae finally decided him to give up the medical for the legal profession. He was called to the bar in 1795, and gained a considerable reputation there as well as a tolerable practice. In 1797 his wife died, and next year he married Catherine Allen, sister-in-law of Josiah and John Wedgwood, through whom he introduced Coleridge to the Morning Post. As a lawyer his greatest public efforts were his lectures (1799) at Lincoln’s Inn on the law of nature and nations, of which the introductory discourse was published, and his eloquent defence (1803) of Jean Gabriel Peltier, a French refugee, tried at the instance of the French government for a libel against the first consul. In 1803 he was knighted, and received the post of recorder at Bombay. The spoilt child of London society was not at home in India, and he was glad to return to England, where he arrived in 1812.
He courteously declined the offer of Perceval to resume political life under the auspices of the dominant Tory party, though tempting prospects of office in connexion with India were opened up. He entered parliament in the Whig interest as member for Nairn. He sat for that county, and afterwards for Knaresborough, till his death. In London society, and in Paris during his occasional visits, he was a recognized favourite for his genial wisdom and his great conversational power. On Mme de Stael’s visit to London he was the only Englishman capable of representing his country in talk with her. His parliamentary career was marked by the same wide and candid liberalism as his private life. He opposed the reactionary measures of the Tory government, supported and afterwards succeeded Romilly in his efforts for reforming the criminal code, and took a leading part both in Catholic emancipation and in the Reform Bill. But he was too little of a partisan, too widely sympathetic and candid, as well as too elaborate, to be a telling speaker in parliament, and was consequently surpassed by more practical men whose powers were incomparably inferior. From 1818 to 1824 he was professor of law and general politics in the East India Company’s College at Haileybury.
In the midst of the attractions of London society and of his parliamentary avocations Mackintosh felt that the real work of his life was being neglected. His great ambition was to write a history of England. His studies both in English and foreign speculation led him to cherish the design also of making some worthy contribution to philosophy. It was not till 1828 that he set about the first task of his literary ambition. This was the Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, prefixed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The dissertation, written mostly in ill-health and in snatches of time taken from his parliamentary engagements, was published in 1831. It was severely attacked in 1835 by James Mill in his Fragment on Mackintosh. About the same time he wrote for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia a “History of England from the Earliest Times to the Final Establishment of the Reformation.” His more elaborate History of the Revolution, for which he had made great researches and collections, was not published till after his death. Already a privy councillor, Mackintosh was appointed commissioner for the affairs of India under the Whig administration of 1830. He died on the 30th of May 1832.
Mackintosh was undoubtedly one of the most cultured and catholic-minded men of his time. His studies and sympathies embraced almost every human interest, except pure science. But the width of his intellectual sympathies, joined to a constitutional indecision and vis inertiae, prevented him from doing more enduring work. Vindiciae Gallicae was the verdict of a philosophic Liberal on the development of the French Revolution up to the spring of 1791, and though the excesses of the revolutionists compelled him a few years after to express his entire agreement with the opinions of Burke, its defence of the “rights of man” is a valuable statement of the cultured Whig’s point of view at the time. The History of the Revolution in England, breaking off at the point where William of Orange is preparing to intervene in the affairs of England, is chiefly interesting because of Macaulay’s admiring essay on it and its author.
A Life, by his son R. J. Mackintosh, was published in 1836.
MACKLIN, CHARLES (c. 1699–1797), Irish actor and playwright,
whose real name was McLaughlin, was born in Ireland,
and had an adventurous youth before coming to Bristol, where
he made his first appearance on the stage as Richmond in
Richard III. He was at Lincoln’s Inn Fields about 1725, and
by 1733 was at Drury Lane, where the quarrel between the
manager and the principal actors resulted in his getting better
parts. When the trouble was over and these were taken from
