doing so may jeopardize Bryan's chances. He is in the uncomfortable position always held by the respectable theorist who gets caught in a revolutionary movement and has to wedge nervously up into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not troubled by any of his scruples, and who really do think that it is all very fine and glorious. In fact Mr. Sewall is much the least picturesque and the least appropriate figure on the platform or platforms upon which Mr. Bryan is standing.

Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a Georgia cracker, is in reality a far more suitable companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest. It must be said, however, that if virtue always received its reward Mr. Watson and not Mr. Bryan would stand at the head of the ticket. In the language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely represents Mr. Bryan raised several powers. The same is true of the Populist as compared to the Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to believe that free silver does represent the ultimate goal, and that his friends do not intend to go further in the direction of fiat money. Mr. Watson's friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are much more fearless and much more logical. They are willing to accept silver as a temporary makeshift, but they want a currency based on corn and cotton next, and ultimately a currency based on the desires of the people who issue it. The statesmanlike utterance of that great financier, Mr. Bryan's chief rival for the nomination and at present his foremost supporter, Mr. Bland, to the effect that he would wipe out the national debt as with a sponge," meets with their cordial approval as far as it goes, but they object to the qualification before the word "debt." In wiping out debts they do not wish to halt merely at the national debt. The Populists indorsed Bryan as the best they could get; but they hated Sewall so that they took the extraordinary step of nominating the Vice President before the President. so as to make sure of a really acceptable man in the person of Watson.

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With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is largely a mere form of intellectual entertainment: but with Mr. Watson it represents an almost ferocious conviction. Some one has said that Mr. Watson, like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is infinitely more in earnest than is Mr Bryan. Mr. Watson belongs to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of the mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula and other worthies of later Rome. Not only do they believe this, but they

say it with appalling frankness They are very sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are also very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot understand; and as they understand but little this opens a very wide field for distrust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they are then at least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves at least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. They possess many strong, rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, because they always confound the essentials and the non-essentials, and though they often make war on vice, they rather prefer making war upon prosperity and refinement.

Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place when he was born in Georgia, for in Georgia the regular Democracy, while it has accepted the principles of the Populists, has made war on their personnel, and in every way strives to press them down. Far better for Mr. Watson would it have been could he have been born in the adjacent state of South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed the Democrats with a gulp. Senator Tillman, the great Populist or Democratic orator from South Carolina, possesses an untrammeled tongue which doubtless Mr. Watson really envies, and moreover Mr. Tillman's brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he never wore either an overcoat or an undershirt, an issue which any Populist statesman finds readily comprehensible, and which he would recognize at first glance as being strong before the people. It needs a certain amount of mental subtlety to appreciate that it is for one's interest to support a man because he is honest and has broad views about coast defenses and the navy, and other similar subjects; but it does not need any mind at all to have one's prejudices stirred in favor of a statesman whose claim to the title rests upon his indifference to the requirements of civilized dress.

Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his extreme suspiciousness, and his uncouth hatred of anything he cannot understand and of all the elegancies and decencies of civilized life, is an interesting personage. He represents the real thing, while Bryan after all is more or less a sham and a compromise. Mr. Watson would at a blow destroy all banks and bankers, with a cheerful, albeit vague, belief that thereby he was in some abstruse way benefiting the people at large. And he would do this with the simple sincerity and faith of an African savage who tries to benefit his tribe by a sufficiency of human sacrifices. But Mr. Bryan

would be beset by ugly doubts when he came to put into effect all the mischievous beliefs of his followers, and Mr. Sewall would doubtless be frankly miserable if it ever became necessary for him to take a lead in such matters. Mr. Watson really ought to be the first man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan second; for he is much the superior in boldness, in thoroughgoing acceptance of his principles according to their logical conclusions, and in sincerity of faith. It is impossible not to regret that the Democrats and Populists should not have put forward in the first place the man who genuinely represents their ideas.

However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Watson will receive the support to which he is entitled as a vice-presidential candidate. In the South the Populists have been so crushed under the heel of the Democrats, and have bitten that heel with such eager venom, that they dislike entering into a coali tion with them; but in the South the Democrats will generally control the election machinery. In the far West, and generally in those states where the Populist wing of the new alliance is ascendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of the Democrats. They know that their principles are substantially identical, and they think it best to support the man who seems to represent the majority faction among the various factions that stand behind Bryan.

As a consequence of this curious condition of affairs there are several interesting possibilities open. The electoral college consists of the men elected at the polls in the various states to record the decrees of the majorities in those states, and it has grown to be an axiom of politics that they must merely register the will of the men who elected them. But it does seem possible that in the present election some of the electors at least may return to the old principles of a century ago and exercise at least a limited discretion in casting their votes. In a state like Nebraska, for instance, it looks as though it would be possible that the electoral ticket on the anti-Republican side would be composed of four Bryan and Watson men and four Bryan and Sewall men. Now in the event of Bryan having more votes than McKinley-that is, in the event of the country showing strong Bedlamite tendencies next November-it might be that a split between Sewall and Watson would give a plurality to Hobart, and in such event it is hardly conceivable that some of the electors would not exercise their discretion by changing their votes. If they did not we might then again see a return to the early and profoundly interesting practice of our fathers and witness a President chosen by one party and a Vice-President by the other.

I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, that these are merely interesting speculations as to what might occur in a hopelessly improbable contingency. I am a good American, with a profound belief in my countrymen, and I have no idea that they will deliberately lower themselves to a level

of their party, and for the amiable and windy demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many entirely honest and intelligent men have been misled by the silver talk, and have for the moment joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious and the wrong headed. These men of character and capacity are blinded by their own misfortunes, or their own needs, or else they have never fairly looked into the matter for themselves, being, like most men, whether in "gold" or "silver" communities, content to follow the opinion of those they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair inquiry these men, 1 am sure, whether they live in Maine, in Tennessee, or in Oregon, will come out on the side of honest money. The shiftless and vicious, and the honest but hopelessly ignorant and puzzle-headed voters cannot be reached; but the average farmer, the average business man, the average workman-in short, the average American--will always stand up for honesty and decency when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on which they are to be found.

THE

HE People's Party has "shot the chutes" of fusion and landed in the deep waters of Democracy as the Independent Republican movement of 1872 did. Nearly all the reform parties of the last generation have had the same fate. Democracy is that bourne from which no reform party returnsas yet. The Independent Republicans organized as a protest against corruption in the administration of the national government and to secure tariff reform on free trade lines. Unlike the People's Party, theirs began its career under the leadership of some of the most distinguished men in the nation. Among them were Hon. David A. Wells, who had been United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue; Ex-Governor Hoadley of Ohio; E. L. Godkin, editor of the New York Nation; Horace White, then of the Chicago Tribure; Ex-Governor Randolph of New Jersey; the Hon. J. D. Cox, who had been Secretary of the Interior; Edward Atkinson of Boston; the Hon. Carl Schurz. It was the expectation of most of these gentlemen and their followers that the Cincinnati convention would nominate Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, our great War Minister at the Court of St. James, for President, and that with his election and a Congress pledged to civil service reforin and revenue tariff the country would enter upon a new era of purity and prosperity. The revulsion when their free trade egg hatched out Horace Greeley was comparable only to that of the gold and machine Democrats at Chicago at the nomination of Bryan and the adoption of the antiCleveland and pro-silver platform. The People's Party had no men of national prestige to give its birth éclat. It has been from the beginning what its name implies-a party of the people.

One of the principal sources was the Farmers' Alliance. To President Polk of that body more than to any other single individual it owes its existence. The agrarian element has been predominant throughout its career. One of its best representatives in this convention was the temporary chairman-the Hon. Marion Butler, the handsome young farmer of North Carolina. Too young to be a candidate for President or Vice-President, he has worked his way up from his fields through the Farmers' Alliance into a seat in the United States Senate. But in

addition to the revolting agrarians, nearly every other reform force-except the Socialists-has been swept into it. Its first national convention of 1892 was attended by veterans of the old Greenback movement like General James B. Weaver, by rottenegging whom, in the campaign that followed, the Southern Democrats made tens of thousands of Populists; by anti-monopolists like Ignatius Donnelly, whose Shakespeare cryptogram has made him one of the best known writers of his day; by leaders like Powderly. It was no easy thing to find common ground for men so dissimilar to meet upon. The delicate work of preparing a platform was accomplished, thanks mainly to the skillful pen of Ignatius Donnelly. The convention went wild with joy when it became known that the Committee on Platform had succeeded in coming to an agreement and unification was assured. For over an hour the thousand members of the convention sang, cheered, danced and gave thanks. It was one of the most thrilling scenes in the panorama of American political conventions. Singularly enough, it was in the Democratic convention, this year, not that of the People's Party, that the forces of enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor flamed the brightest.

The Populist gathering of this year lacked the drill and distinction and wealth of the Republican convention held the month before in the same building. It had not the ebullient aggressiveness of the revolutionary Democratic assembly at Chicago, nor the brilliant drivers who rode the storm there. Every one commented on the number of gray heads-heads many of them grown white in previous independent party movements. The delegates were poor men. One of the "smart" reporters of the cosmopolitan press dilated with the wit of the boulevardier upon finding some of them sitting with their shoes off, -to rest their feet and save their shoes, as they confessed to him. Perhaps even his merry pen would have withheld its shafts if he had realized that these delegates had probably had to walk many weary miles to get to the convention, and that they had done their political duty at such sacrifice only for conscience sake. Cases are well known of delegates who walked because too poor to pay their railroad fare. It was one day discovered

that certain members of one of the most important delegations were actually suffering for food. They had had no regular sleeping place, having had to save what money they had for their nickel meals at the lunch counter. The unexpected length of the proceedings had exhausted their little store of money. Among these men, who were heroically enduring without complaint such hardships in order to attend to political duties which so many of those who laugh at them think beneath their notice, were some of the blacklisted members of the American Railway Union. They were there in the hope that they might have the opportunity of helping to make their leader, Eugene V. Debs, a candidate for President. But Mr. Debs, though he had a large following, refused to allow his name to be put before the convention, urging that every one should unite in favor of Bryan, as there seemed a chance of his election, and through him the people might at least hold their ground until ready for a more decisive advance. In the South, the Democracy represents the classes, the People's Party, the masses. The most eloquent speeches made were those of whites and blacks explaining to the convention what the rule of the Democrats meant in the South. A delegate from Georgia, a coal-black negro, told how the People's Party alone gave full fellowship to his race, when it had been abandoned by the Republicans and cheated and betrayed by the Democrats. It was to this recognition of the colored men a distinguished political manager referred when he said recently in an interview that the Populists of the South could

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go where they belonged-" with the negroes." With thrilling passion the white Populists of the South pleaded that the convention should not leave them to the tender mercies of the Democrats, by accepting the Democratic nominees without the pledges or conditions which would save the Populists from going under the chariot wheels of southern Democracy. 'Cyclone" Davis, spokesman of the Texas delegation, tall and thin as a southern pine, with eyes kindled with the fire of the prophet, a voice of far reach and pathos, and a vocabulary almost every other word of which seemed drawn from the Gospels or the denunciatory Psalins, wrestled and prayed with the convention to save the Populists of Texas from the fate that awaited them if they were sent back, unprotected, to their old enemies. The Democrats, the classes," hate with a hatred like that of the Old Régime of France for the Sans Culottes of

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St. Antoine the new people who have dared to question the immemorial supremacy of their aristocratic rule, and who have put into actual association, as not even the Republicans have done, political brotherhood with the despised negro. This is the secret of the bolt of the Texas Populists, just announced. They have gone over to gold with the sound money men of both the old parties, because more than silver, more than anti-monopoly, the issue with them is the elementary right to political manhood. The issue in many parts of the South is even more elementary-the right to life itself, so bitter is the feeling of the old Democracy against these upstarts from the despised masses of the whites. The line between the old Democracy and Populism in the South is largely a line of bloody graves. When the convention decided to indorse Bryan without asking for any pledge from the Democrats for the protection of the southern Populists one of its most distinguished members, a member of Congress, well known throughout the country, turned to me and said: "This may cost me my life. I can return home only at that risk. The feeling of the Democracy against us is one of murderous hate. I have been shot at many times. Grand juries will not indict our assailants. Courts give us no protection."

The People's Party convention was dated to follow the conventions of the two other parties by its managers in the pessimistic belief that the Democratic party as well as the Republican would be under the thumb of the trusts and the "gold bugs."

HON. MARION BUTLER OF NORTH CAROLINA.

Drawn for the Journal.

HON. THOMAS WATSON.

The People's Party would then have the easy task of. gathering into its ranks the bolting silver and anti-monopolist Republicans and Democrats, and increasing its two millions of votes to the five and a half millions that would put it in possession of the White House for four years. It was a simple plan. That its lead would be taken from it by one of the old parties, least of all that this would be done by the party of President Cleveland and Secretary Olney, those in charge of the People's Party did not dream. The Democracy had not forgotten how they were forced to accept Horace Greeley in 1872, because the Independent Republicans had had their convention first. Its progressive elements with a leader of surpassing shrewdness and dash, Altgeld, who unites a William Lloyd Garrison's love of justice with the political astuteness of a Zach Chandler or a Samuel J. Tilden, took advantage of the tactical error of the People's Party managers in postponing its convention. The delegates as they betook themselves to St. Louis thought they saw a most promising resemblance between the prospects of the People's Party in 1896 and those of the Republican party in 1856. The by elections since 1892 showed that its membership roll was rising and was well on the way to two millions. It was the party whose position was the most advanced on the question of social control of privileged social power, which, if contemporary literature is any guide, is the question of the times. But as the end of four years' work since the young party startled the old politicians in 1892 by showing up over a million votes in its first presidential election, the party is going this year to vote for President for one who is willing to take its votes but not its nomination. He will be its nominee but not its candidate. Such are the perplexities of the situation that it is even extremely doubtful whether the nominee will receive an official