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to his chief to take up the work of the latter just where it was left. The Republican party has this year nominated such a man in the person of Mr. Hobart. But nominations of this kind have by no means been always the rule of recent years. No change of parties, for instance, could well produce a greater revolution in policy than would have been produced at almost any time during the last three years if Mr. Cleveland had died and Mr. Stevenson had succeeded him.

One sure way to secure this desired result would undoubtedly be to increase the power of the VicePresident. He should always be a man who would be consulted by the President on every great party question. It would be very well if he were given a seat in the Cabinet. It might be well if in addition to his vote in the Senate in the event of a tie he should be given a vote, on ordinary occasions, and perchance on occasions a voice in the debates. A man of the character of Mr. Hobart is sure to make his weight felt in an administration, but the power of thus exercising influence should be made official rather than personal.

The present contest offers a striking illustration of the way in which the Vice-President ought and ought not to be nominated, and to study this it is necessary to study not only the way in which the

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HON. ARTHUR SEWALL.

From a recent photograph.

different candidates were nominated, but at least in outline the characters of the candidates themselves.

For the first time in many years, indeed for the first time since parties have fairly crystallized along their present lines, there are three parties running, two of which support the same presidential candidate but different candidates for the vice-presidency. Each one of these parties has carried several states during the last three or four years. Each party has a right to count upon a number of electoral votes as its own. Closely though the Democrats and Populists have now approximated in their principles as enunciated in the platforms of Chicago and St. Louis, they yet do differ on certain points, and neither would have any chance of beating the Republicans without the help of the other. The result has been a coalition, yet each party to the coalition has retained enough of its jealous individuality to make it refuse to accept the candidate of the other for the second position on the ticket.

The Republican party stands on a normal and healthy party footing. It has enunciated a definite set of principles entirely in accord with its past actions. It has nominated on this platform a President and Vice-President, both of whom are thorough

Mr.

going believers in all the party principles set forth in the platform upon which they stand. Mr. McKinley believes in sound finance, -that is, in a currency based upon gold and as good as gold. So does Mr. Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in a protective tariff. So does Mr. Hobart. McKinley believes in the only method of preserving orderly liberty, that is, in seeing that the laws are enforced at whatever cost. So does Mr. Hobart. In short, Mr. Hobart stands for precisely the same principles that are represented by Mr. McKinley. He is a man of weight in the community, who has had wide experience both in busi. ness and in politics. He is taking an active part in the campaign, and he will be a power if elected to the vicepresidency. All the elements which have rallied behind Mr. McKinley are just as heartily behind Mr. Hobart. The two represent the same forces, and they stand for a party with a coherent organization and a definite purpose,

to the carrying out of which they are equally pledged. It will be a matter of much importance to the nation that the next Vice-President should stand for some settled policy. It is an unhealthy thing to have the Vice President and President represented by principles so far apart that the succession of one to the place of the other means a change as radical

MR. WATSON'S HOME.

as any possible party overturn. The straining and dislocation of our governmental institutions was very great when Tyler succeeded Harrison and Johnson succeeded Lincoln. In each case the majority

of the party that had won the victory felt that it had been treated with scandalous treachery, for Tyler grew to be as repulsive to the Whigs as Polk himself, and the Republicans could scarcely have hated

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MR. WATSON IN HIS EDITORIAL ROOM

Seymour more than they hated Johnson. The Vice President has a threefold relation. First to the administration; next as presiding officer in the Senate, where he should be a man of dignity and force; and third in his social position, for socially he ranks second to the President alone. Mr. Morton was in every way an admirable Vice-President under General Harrison, and had he succeeded to the presidential chair there would have been no break in the great policies which were being pushed forward by the administration. But during Mr. Cleveland's two incumbencies Messrs. Hendricks and Stevenson have represented, not merely hostile factions, but principles and interests from which he was sundered by a gulf quite as great as that which divided him from his normal party foes. Mr. Sewall would make a colorless Vice-President, and were he at any time to succeed Mr. Bryan in the White House would travel Mr. Bryan's path only with extreme reluct ance and under duress. Mr. Watson would be a more startling, more attractive, and more dangerous figure, for if he got the chance he would lash the nation with a whip of scorpions, while Bryan would be content with the torture of ordinary thongs.

Finally, Mr. Hobart would typify as strongly as Mr. McKinley himself what was best in the Republican party and in the nation, and would stand as one of the known champions of his party on the very questions at issue in the present election. He is a man whose advice would be sought by all who

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are prominent in the administration. In short, he I would be the kind of man whom the electors are certain to choose as Vice-President if they exercise their choice rationally.

The men who left the Republican party because of the nomination of McKinley would have left it just as quickly if Hobart had been nominated. They do not believe in sound finance, and though many of the bolters object to anarchy and favor protection, they feel that in this crisis their personal desires must be repressed and that they are conscientiously bound to support the depreciated dollar even at the cost of incidentally supporting the principles of a low tariff and the doctrine that a mob should be allowed to do what it likes with immunity. There are many advocates of clipped or depreciated money who are rather sorry to see the demand for such currency coupled with a demand for more lawlessness and an abandonment by the government of the police functions which are the essential attributes of civilization; but they have overcome their reluctance, feeling that on the whole it is more important that the money of the nation should be unsound than that its law should be obeyed. People who feel this way are just as much opposed to Mr. Hobart as to Mr. McKinley. They object to the platform upon which the two men stand, and they object as much to the character of one man as to the character of the other. They are repelled by McKinley's allegiance to the cause of sound money, and find nothing to propitiate them in Hobart's uncompromisingly hon est attitude on the same question. There is no reason

whatever why any voter who would wish to vote against the one should favor the other, or vice versa.

When we cross the political line all this is changed. On the leading issue of the campaign the entire triangle of candidates are a unit. Mr. Bryan, the nominee for the presidency, and Messrs. Sewall and Watson, the nominees for the vice presidency, are almost equally devoted adherents of the light weight dollar and of a currency which shall not force a man to repay what he has borrowed, and shall punish the wrong headed laborer, who expects to be paid his wages in money worth something, as heavily as the business man or farmer who is so immoral as to wish

to pay his debts. All three are believers in that old-world school of finance which appears under such protean changes of policy, always desiring the increase of the circulating medium, but differing as to the means, which in one age takes the form of putting base metal in with the good, or of clipping the good, and in another assumes the guise of fiat money, or the free coinage of silver. On this currency question they are substantially alike, agreeing (as one of their adherents picturesquely put it, in arguing in favor of that form of abundant currency which has as its highest exponent the money of the late Confederacy) that "the money which was good enough for the soldiers of Washington is good enough for us." As a matter of fact the soldiers of Washington were not at all grateful for the money which the loud-mouthed predecessors of Mr. Bryan and his kind then thought "good enough" for them. The money with which the veterans of Washington were

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paid was worth two cents on the dollar, and as yet neither Mr. Bryan, Mr. Sewall nor Mr. Watson has advocated a two-cent copper dollar. Still they are striving toward this ideal, and in their advocacy of the 50 cent dollar they are one.

He

But beyond this they begin to differ. Mr. Sewall distinctly sags behind the leader of the spike team, Mr. Bryan, and still more distinctly behind his rival, or running mate, or whatever one may choose to call him, the Hon. Tom Watson. There is far more regard for the essential fitness of things in a ticket which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson than one which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Sewall. Mr. Watson is a man of Mr. Bryan's type, only a little more so. But Mr. Sewall is of a different type, and possesses many attributes which must make association with him exceedingly painful, not merely to Mr. Watson, but to Mr. Bryan himself. He is a well-to-do man. Indeed in many communities he would be called a rich man. is a banker, a railroad man, a shipbuilder, and has been successful in business. Now if Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson really stand for any principle it is hostility to this kind of success. Thrift, industry and business energy are qualities which are quite incompatible with true Populistic feeling. Payment of debts, like the suppression of riots, is abhorrent to the Populistic mind. Such conduct strikes the Populist as immoral. Mr. Bryan made his appearance in Congress with two colleagues elected on the same ticket, one of whom stated to the present writer that no honest man ever earned $5,000 a year; that whoever got that amount stole it. Mr. Sewall has earned many times $5,000 a year. He is a prosperous capitalist. Populism never prospers save where men are unprosperous, and

institutions for the encouragement of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable associations quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact that the silver man himself is rich. He is even for the moment blind to the further fact that these pro silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor Altgeld and their compeers, strenuously insist that the obligations to themselves shall be liquidated in gold; indeed this particular idiosyncracy of the silver leaders is not much frowned upon by the bulk of the Populists, because it has at least the merit of savoring strongly of "doing" one's creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver mine owners may have earned their money honestly can outweigh the other fact that they champion a species of currency which will

From a sketch by a

Journal artist at the

notification meeting,

ARTHUR SEWALL.

your true Populist is especially intolerant of business success. If a man is a successful business man he at once calls him a plutocrat.

He makes only one exception. A miner or specu lator in mines may be many times a millionaire and yet remain in good standing in the Populist party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in his mind the belief that silver is a cheap metal and that silver money is, while not fiat money, still a long step toward it. Silver is connected in his mind with scaling down debts, the partial repudiation of obligations, and other measures aimed at those odious moneyed tyrants who lend money to persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have put their ill-gotten gains in savings banks and kindred wicked

make most thrifty and honest men poorer, in the minds of the truly logical Populist.

But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the way of owing his wealth to silver. He has made his money precisely as the most loathed reprobate of Wall Street -or of New York, which the average Populist regards as synonymous with Wall Street-has made his. The average Populist does not draw fine distinctions. There are in. New York, as in other great cities, scoundrels of great wealth who have made their money by means skillfully calculated to come just outside the line of criminality. There are other men who have made their money exactly as the successful miner or farmer makes his,-that is, by the exercise of shrewdness, business daring, energy and thrift. But the Populist draws no line of division between these two classes.

They have made money, and that is enongh. One may have built railroads and the other have wrecked them, but they are both railroad men in his eyes, and that is all. One may have swindled his creditors, and the other built up a bank which has been of incalculable benefit to all who have had dealings with it, but to the Populist they are both gold bugs, and as such noxious. Mr. Sewall is the type of man the contemplation of which usually throws a Populist orator into spasms. But it happens that he believes in free silver, just as other very respectable men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot of a graveyard rabbit. There are very able men and very lovely women who believe in each or all of these, and there are a much larger number who believe in free silver. Had they lived in the days of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin

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being at that time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which would give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they only believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as a public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men. He can hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago platform. In the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to thinking at all about public questions, the free silver plank is very far from being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put together with such perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and which has the same strenuous objection to the exercise of the police power by the general government that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have gone beyond the unpolished-stone period of civilization.

The men who object to what they style "government by injunction" are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinocerous. They are interesting as representing a geological survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the least chance of their making the principles of this agesburied past living factors in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one's debts in coins worth 50 cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to plunge one's country into anarchy by providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the world, and there are always a certain number of people whose minds are weak and whose emotions are strong and who effervesce with sympathy toward any man who does wrong, and with indignation against any man who chastises the criminal for having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are always reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to do wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, very practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great political party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.

Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked the Supreme Court. Again this represents a species of atavism,—that is, of recurrence to the ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors. Savages do not like an independent and upright judiciary. They want the judge to decide their way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. The Populists experience much the same emotions when they realize that the judiciary stands between them and plunder.

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Watson,--Codlin, not Short. He has, of course, a vein of the erratic in his character, or otherwise he would not be in such company at all, and would have no quality that would recommend him to them. But on the whole his sympathies must lie with the man who saves money rather than with the man who proposes to take away the money when it has been saved, and with the policeman who arrests a violent criminal rather than with the criminal. Such sympathy puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist camp. He is loud in his professions of belief in the remarkable series of principles for which he is supposed to stand, but his protestations ring rather hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubtless intends to swallow Sewall, for he thinks him an unimportant tail to the Bryan kite. But, though unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling of irritation, as being at the best a rather ludicrous contrast to the rest of the kite. He contributes no element of strength to the Bryan ticket, for other men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of their toil simply regard him as a renegade, and the average Populist or Populistic Democrat does not like him, and accepts him simply because he fears not

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