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notification of his nomination or a request that he will consent to be a candidate. It is urged by influ ential members of the party that as a Democrat he would be "embarrassed" by such a notification and request, and that the "crisis" is so grave that they must sacrifice their party to their patriotism, and save their country by voting for the Democratic candidate without his knowledge "officially "-on the sly, as it were. Until their convention met

EUGENE V. DEBS.

the noise of dissent has grown fainter as the excitement of the campaign rises. The party is composed altogether of men who had already had the selfdiscipline of giving up party for the sake of principle. Every one in it had been originally either a Democrat or a Republican, and had severed all his old political ties to unite with those who, like himself, cared more for reform than old party comforts. To men who had already made one such sacrifice, another was not difficult. The People's Party is bivertebrate as well as bimetallic. It was built up of the old Greenback and Anti-monopoly elements, reinforced by castaways of the Union Labor, National, and other third party enterprises. Its members had become well acquainted with the adversities of fusion and amalgamation, and used to being 66 traded " out of existence.

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One of the plainest looks on the face of the St. Louis convention was anxietyanxiety of the managers who for years had been planning to get by fusion -with Republicans or Democrats-the substance if not the name of victory, and saw in the gathering many resolute "middle of the road" opponents; anxiety of the mass of the delegates lest they were being sold out; anxiety, most surprising of all, among the radicals, lest by insisting too much upon their own radicalism they might explode a coalescence which, if left to gather headway.. might later be invaluable to them. The predominant anxiety found its most striking expression in the preparation and adoption of the platform. In the committee room every suggestion for the utterance of any novelty in principle or application was ruthlessly put down. When the platform was reported to the convention, the previous question was at once moved, and the platform adopted without a word of debate. Even in the Democratic convention half a day was given to discussing the articles of political faith. No motion to reconsider this closure and secure a discussion of the principles of the movement was made. Even the radicals sat silent. In

these millions had hoped that theirs would be the main body of a victorious army. This hope ends in their reduction to the position of an irregular force of guerillas fighting outside the regular ranks, the fruit of the victory, if won, to be appropriated by a general who would not recognize them. Even more interesting is it that this is cheerfully accepted by most of the rank and file of the People's Party. No protest of sufficient importance to cause a halt was made at the first, when the shock was greatest, and

the proceedings of the convention the creed of the party was therefore practically not considered. In a large view the only subject which engrossed the gathering was whether the party should keep on in its own path or merge for this campaign with the Democracy. The solicitude to do nothing which should hinder the Rising of the People, if that had really begun, was the motive that led to the indorsement of Bryan. Most of the three hundred, over one hundred of them from Texas alone, who refused to unite in this, would have joined its one thousand supporters had the protection they prayed for against the old Democracy been given them by the exaction of guarantees from the Democratic candidate and campaign managers. It was not that they loved Bryan less. A determination that the People's Party and that for which it stood should not be lost if this year's battle was lost by its ally, Democracy, accounts for the nomination of Watson. The majority which insisted that all the precedents should be violated and the Vice-President nominated before the President, and which rejected Sewall and took Thomas E. Watson of Georgia-a second Alexander H. Stephens in delicacy of physique and robustness of eloquence and loyalty to the people-was composed, as the result showed, mostly of the same men who afterward joined in the nomination of Bryan. It is true there was a strong opposition to Sewall, because he was national bank president, railroad director and corporation man. But the nomination speeches and the talk of the delegates showed convincingly that the same men who meant to support Bryan were equally well minded that there should not be an absolute surrender to the Democracy. The Democracy must yield something in return for the much greater concession the People's Party was to give.

Contrary to expectation and to the plan by which the two conventions had been brought to St. Louis on the same dates, the silver convention exercised no influence on that of the Populists. The delegates of the latter listened with unconcealed impatience to every reference to the silver body, and refused to allow its members any rights upon the floor. The report of the Conference Committee was listened to without interest. The tumultuous refusal of the convention to allow Senator Stewart of the silver convention an extension of time when he was addressing them, was one of the many signs that the convention cared less for silver than did the Democratic convention. Most of the Democrats really believe free silver is a great reform. That is as far as they have got. But it was hard to find among the Populists any who would not privately admit that they knew silver was only the most trifling installment of reform, and many-a great manydid not conceal their belief that it was no reform at all. The members of the People's Party have had most of their education on the money question from the Greenbackers among them-men like the only candidate who contended with Bryan for the nomi

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nation before the convention-Colonel S. F. Norton, author of the "Ten Men of Money Island," of which hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold, who for twenty years has been giving his means and his life energy to agitating for an ideal currency. The People's Party believes really in a currency redeemable in all the products of human labor, and not in gold alone, nor in gold and silver. A party which hates Democracy accepted the Democratic nominee, and a party which has no faith in silver as a panacea accepted silver practically as the sole issue of the campaign. Peter Cooper, the venerable philan thropist, candidate for President on the Greenback ticket in 1876-whose never absent air cushion Nast by one of his finest strokes of caricature converted into a crown for General Butler when running as Greenback and Labor candidate for Governor of Massachusetts-presided over the first days of the convention from within the frame of a very poorly painted portrait. But later, by accident or design, about the time when it thus became plain that the convention would make only a platonic declaration of its paper money doctrines, and would put forward only" Free Silver" for actual campaign use, the face of the old leader disappeared and was seen no more with its homely inspiration above the chairman's head.

The solution of the paradoxical action of the convention as to Democracy and money was the craving for a union of reform forces which burned with all the fires of hope and fear in the breasts of the delegates, and overcame all their academic differences of economic doctrine and all their old political prejudices. The radicals had men who were eager to raise the convention against the stultification they thought it was perpetrating. If the issue had been made there was an even chance, good arithmeticians among the observers thought, that the convention could have been carried by them, and a 66 stalwart ticket put into the field on a platform

HON. IGNATIUS DONNELLY OF MINNESOTA.

far in advance of that adopted in Omaha in 1892, one demanding, for instance, the public ownership of all monopolies. This contingent felt that the social question is more than the money question, the money question more than the silver question, and the silver question more than the candidacy of any one person. If the money question was to be the issue it wanted it to be the whole money questionthe question how an honest dollar can be made instead of being only stumbled on in placers or bonanzas, and how it can be made as elastic as the creative will of the people and as expansive as civil

ization itself. Certainly the strongest single body of believers in the convention was this of anti-monopoly in everything, including the currency. These men

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would much rather have declared for the demone tization of gold than the remonetization of silver. That their strength was formidable-formidable enough to have split the convention near the middle, if not to have carried it--no one could deny who studied on the ground the feelings and beliefs of the delegates. But those who might have called this force into activity were quiescent, for Col. Norton's candidacy was unsought, impromptu and without organization. The leaders did not lead, and their followers did not clamor to be led. "General" J. S. Coxey of the Commonweal Army, who has left large property interests to suffer while he has devoted himself to educating the people on his Good Roads" plan of internal improvements, to be paid for by non-interest bearing bonds, was present, and made no resistance outside of the Committee of Resolutions. Ex-Governor Waite of Colorado, whose name will be cheered in any assembly of labor men or Populists, as the only Governor who has called out the militia to protect the workingmen against violence at the hands of their employers, for the sake of harmony forbore to press his claims at the head of a contesting delegation from Colorado. Senator Peffer, who has shown an ample courage in every emergency at Washington, sat silent, though he was bitterly opposed to the methods of the managers. The fear ruled that unless the reform forces united this time they would never again have the opportunity to unite. It was in the air that there must be union. The footfall of the hour for action was heard approaching. It was a phsychological moment of rapprochement against an appalling danger which for thirty years now had been seen rising in the sky. If the radicals made a mistake, it was a patriotic mistake. The delegates knew perfectly well that the silver miners were spending a great deal of money and .politics to get them to do just what they were doing. They knew what the Democratic politicians were doing with the same object. They knew that with some of their own politicians the anxiety to return to the old political home was not dissociated from visions of possible fatted calf. But though they knew all this, they went on by an overwhelming majority to do what the mine owners and the Democrats and the traders wanted them to do, and the acquiescence of the mass of the party in their action is now beyond question. We can comprehend this better when we see men like Edward Bellamy, the head of the Nationalists, and Henry George of the Single Taxers, and the Rev. W. D. P. Bliss of the Christian Socialists also taking the same attitude and for precisely the same reason that the real issue is "between men and money," in Bellamy's phrase; and they cannot afford to side with money against men.

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AN OUTLOOK UPON THE AGRARIAN PROPAGANDA

IN THE WEST.

BY NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS.

RECENT discussions and editorials in the various

journals and reviews of New York seem to indicate that the East does not fully understand either the strength of the silver sentiment or the methods and arguments by which it is being advanced in the interior and West. During several weeks past I have been lecturing before various Chautauquas, summer assemblies and colleges of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. These summer assemblies, continuing through ten or twelve days with their summer schools, lectures and concerts by the best platform speakers of the country, assemble audiences at once vast and widely representative. Here pulses and throbs the intellectual life of the entire section. Conversation with a large number of representative men has convinced me that as Republicans we must adopt new methods of discussion and redouble our energies if we are to destroy the silver heresy and maintain sound money. The outline of a single address given to an assembly of farmers in a country schoolhouse in Iowa will interpret the methods and arguments used throughout the entire West.

The chief feature of the speaker's address was his charts. Upon one end of a blackboard was written an estimate of the number of millions of bushels of oats raised this year by the farmers of Iowa, and a further estimate of the value of the crop at the market price of 13 cents a bushel. The Populist portrayed the farmer working like a slave through eight months of the year to produce this 13-cent bushel of oats, while the railway in a single day and night hauled the grain to Chicago, where it receives 7 of the 13 cents as its recompense. Now the first cent of the seven extorted will, urged the orator, take away all hope of the farmer paying the interest on his mortgage; the second cent will take from wife or daughter woolen dress warm against the winter; the third will take the boy and girl out of school and college and condemn them to the drudgery of the farmhand or housemaid; the fourth cent will take away all possibility of purchasing the review, the newspaper, the book, and drive men back to barbarism. When the orator reached this point in his discussion the audience was inflamed to the highest point. At that moment self-interest and prejudice armed his listeners against all arguments for sound money. Had the Republican committee been there when the assembly dispersed to present each farmer with a library devoted to the exposure

of the silver heresy, even the multitude of books would not have availed for reversing the fariner's judgment or convincing him that the gold standard is not responsible for his misfortunes, or that free silver is not the unfailing panacea for all his ills.

In many of the rural districts class hatred and sectionalism are invoked against McKinley and the Republican party. The farmer is told that the reason why the railroads extort 7 cents out of the 13 paid for the bushel of oats is that the railroad must pay interest on watered stock representing two or three times the cost of building the road. Now the argument of the Populist is that this water must be squeezed out of the stock before the farmer can hope for better rates. As a means to this desired end it is urged that since railways cannot increase the fare of three cents a mile, the success of free silver will throw the railway into the hands of a receiver and force an entire readjustment. Like dynamite, class hatred is a powerful weapon, and the farmer is urged to use it against his ancient enemy, the cor poration. By the skillful use of half truths and falsehoods the prophet of free silver succeeds in inciting the farmer to punish the railways in the hope that some time in the long run benefit will accrue to him in the shape of lessened charges for transportation.

Strangely enough, one of the most effective arguments that is being used is directed not against capital, nor against ability as represented by the employer, but against the trades unions of the cities. The farmers affirm that carpenters, plasterers and masons have, through strikes and riots, succeeded in maintaining a false standard of wages. In the face of the falling prices for the farmer, with wheat selling for 60 cents a bushel, the carpenter and mason has, through the long period of financial depression since 1893, held his wage up to 40 and 50 cents an hour, all this, too, despite the fact that the farmer of the great interior and western states has during the same period toiled not eight hours a day, but fourteen or sixteen, and received on an average but 78 cents per day. By reason of their isolation the farmers feel that it has been impossible for them to organize trades unions enabling them to maintain their rights in the same way that the laboring men ́ in the cities have defended themselves against wrong. Now the problem that fronts the farmer, the Populist urges, is how shall the wage of the laborer in the city be equalized with the wage of

the laborer in the pasture or meadow. In nature there is a law by which the water in the spout of the tea-kettle finds the same level with the water in the kettle itself. But wages will not equalize themselves; the task of equalization asks the farmer's aid. The gist of the silver orator's argument touching this point is this: Suppose Bryan is elected and the country goes to a silver basis. The carpenter's or mason's wages will still stand at 40 or 50 cents an hour, for at the very best he can scarcely hope for an advance in wages of more than 5 or 10 cents an hour. But with the small increase in amount of wages will come the halving of the purchasing power of his money. But for his 60-cent bushel of wheat the farmer will, under the new conditions, obtain $1.20. Not capital, not ability, not labor, but land, therefore, is to receive the benefit of the financial change. Thus the wages of the farmer will be made to approach those of the carpenter or inason, and that, too, without riot or strike or the use of

arms.

Unfortunately this method secures the transfer of a part of the wages from the pocket of the carpenter or mason in the city to the pocket of the farmer in the country. It gains for one class of workingmen at the expense of another. It is my firm conviction that the election of McKinley and the success of the principles, financial and economic, for which he stands, will increase the farmer's wage without lessening the wage of the laboring men in cities. A box filled with ballots representing such arguments and half-truths would not equal a single vote cast by wise men in the days of Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson.

Much is being said about the campaign of educa tion. Unfortunately, unto the present moment the education has been largely on the part of the Populists. The zeal of the silver orator is something to stir the wonder and alarm of all intelligent men. Like the zealot of old, the silverite rises yet a great while before day to compass one convert before milking his cows or finding his way into the fields. All day long he hastens his footsteps that he may have an hour in the evening for visiting some unconvinced neighbor. He returns from the field to take up the argument where he dropped the thread in the morning. He counts himself the divinely ordained apostle of the new financial movement. He goes to church on Sunday to obtain inspiration for prosecuting his mission during the week. Farmers picnics by streams and in groves are held. The bicycle race, the horse race, the wrestling match and the silver debate increase the crowds. When the sound money orator begins his argument he finds himself working against signal odds. He who starts out to convert others finds it hard to confess he himself has been wrong. He is impervious to argument. His mind may be compared to a bottle empty and corked as it floats in the sea. The ocean itself can

not fill such a bottle, and the larger the ocean and the greater the vacuum of the bottle, the tighter is the cork pushed in. Under such conditions the old orthodox methods of campaign are impotent. A new kind of literature even must be evolved. Many difficulties hitherto unknown have been developed. Then the successful tariff speaker is not always a successful disputant of the financial question. A clear view of the silver question involves wide read. ing and experience and a trained mind,-conditions asking for years, not weeks of education. Up to the present moment the great need in the Republican campaign is a need of illustrated literature. A short, spicy statement with a cartoon or picture will distribute itself; it has wings and feet and walks or flies throughout the township or county. Contrarywise, long pamphlets, studied financial discussions and the abstract documents sent out will never be read by farmers, but will serve during the coming winter for lighting the kitchen fire of the man who is supposed to distribute them. One of the members of the English Cabinet has said that Lord Rosebery was defeated and Salisbury elected by reason of the large posters pasted on barns and the cartoons sent out through patent insides of newspapers. Beyond a peradventure, a new kind of campaign document must be invented. The eye offers a short route to reason and judgment. The poster as an influence in the campaign offers more hope than any other method of public instruction.

After patient investigation I am convinced that the present industrial depression has its explanation in causes other than the appreciation of gold or the depreciation of silver. In the long run the farmers not less than the laboring men in cities have only misfortune and sorrow as the result of the election of Bryan. But my acquaintance with the rural districts of states like Illinois and Iowa makes it impossible for me to believe that the farmers will ever consent to a policy of repudiation. These states were settled largely by New England in connection with the Kansas and Nebraska troubles in 1857. No section in the entire country represents a higher average of intelligence and culture; no section buys more books and magazines, or sends a larger proportion of its young men and women to the academy and college. Beecher and Gough used to say no section in the land gave a more appreciative hearing. The country district has always furnished the lead ers to the city. Eighty five per cent. of the great financiers, lawyers, bankers, merchants and professional men of the cities have come from the country, or from the small villages. The leaders of the next generation in the city are to-day toiling behind the plow in the country. I have abiding confidence in the intelligence and morality and sober second thought of the farmers and their sons. Once the question is fully before them they will refuse dishonor and repudiation.

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