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fact that a great many home missionaries were months behind on their salaries, and mentioning several instances of great privation.

In order that readers of this volume may know how some of the clergy regarded the silver plank and the candidate, I give a few

extracts.

September 27th the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, in a sermon delivered at the Madison Square Presbyterian church, New York, said:

Dr. Parkhurst's Opinion.

I am not here to argue the financial question. The present conditions illustrate the truth I am trying to drive home. National prosperity will come back when confidence comes back, when the nation gets its feet out of the quagmire and back onto solid ground. The business of the nation is done on credit. Credit is based on mutual confidence. Mutual confidence does not exist today and attempts are being made, deliberate and hot blooded, to destroy what little of it remains. I dare, in God's pulpit, to brand such attempts as accursed and treasonable.

The Rev. Dr. Robert S. McArthur, of the Calvary Baptist church, West Fifty-seventh street, New York, on September 13th, said:

Dr. McArthur's Opinion.

There cannot really be any conflict between labor and capital, when both are rightly understood. Labor is capital and capital is merely the fruit of labor. Let us not allow any distinction to be made. Nearly all of the American people belong to the toiling masses. The pen is often a far more heavy instrument of labor than the pick or the shovel. He is the enemy of the toiling masses who would pay for their labor in depreciated coin. These Populistic orators who are trying to make wage earners believe that they should be willing to take a fifty-three cent dollar for one hundred cents' worth of work are the enemies of mankind.

Speaking of my letter of acceptance, he said:

Really the author of that composition must be a very commonplace sort of a citizen. It may be well doubted if ever before since the foundation of the Republic so weak a production came from the hand of a man who aspired to be the President of the United States. It reads as though the author had neither hope nor heart in his cause. The whole letter is marked by an absence of thought. It seems clearly to show that the writer has lost courage, heart, hope, push and pluck. Yet in it he still shows his sympathy with some of the most dangerous planks of the platform on which he stands.

On the question of civil service reform, he said:

Civil service reform is a great moral issue. In the years to come the interest in this reform shown by the Presidents I have named, and particularly by President Cleveland, will redound to their glory. The ignorance of the candidate for the Presidency of whom I am speaking in regard to civil service reform would be unworthy of an alderman in a small city. Were this man

not a candidate for President, as I have said, his letter would be unworthy of notice, but should he be elected he will have control of hundreds of thousands of offices. He writes as though he knew nothing of and cared to know nothing of the laws governing appointments. Perhaps I need not worry myself, for the American people will see to it that he never has the dispensing of offices from the chair of the President of the United States, the chair higher than the loftiest room beneath God's throne tonight.

On Monday, October 2, there appeared in the press of the country a statement made by Archbishop Ireland in response to a request from twenty-seven business men of Minnesota. After denouncing other planks of the platform, he said:

Archbishop Ireland's Opinion.

The question before the people of America today is the coinage of silver by this country independently of the great commercial nations of the world at the ratio of 16 to 1. The boast that the United States is able alone to whip England and the rest of the world into coinage of silver at 16 to 1, or to force the value of silver up to $1.29 an ounce, is mere nonsense. We are a great people, indeed, but we have not yet grown to that commercial strength that our country means the commercial world. Herr Bismarck counseled the United States to go ahead and make the experiment alone. Yes, and some Americans quote his advice as an authority. The sly old fox would, indeed, be pleased to see America make the experiment and go to the bottom of the sea.

I am absolutely convinced that the laboring classes will suffer most of all from free silver coinage; but will not the farmers be benefited? Will they not receive a higher price for their products? May be a higher price-but not a higher value. Of what use is it to have a dollar instead of a half dollar, if a dollar can purchase no more than the half dollar?

I may of course be mistaken. But I have come to look upon the present agitation as the great test of universal suffrage and popular sovereignty. Can the people defend the public honor and the institutions of the country at the polls, as they have done on the field of battle? Can they be so calm and deliberate in their judgment, so careful to weigh all things in the scale of reason, and to avoid all rash experiments, that they can be trusted with the settlement of grave, social and political problems? That is the question that is before us at the present moment.

At the Central Congregational church in New York, on September 13, the Rev. A. J. F. Behrends said, among other things:

Mr. Behrend's Opinion.

Today we are at the cross roads of our period of national existence. When it is proclaimed that a grain of gold representing the cost of production of 31 grains of silver is an equivalent for 16 grains of the latter metal, we are confronted with a bold bare-faced falsehood. Such a doctrine leads on the trail of anarchy. Thirty-five years ago the liberty of a people was hunted to its lair,

and it was preserved with the bayonet. The people of the United States will assemble this fall as they did in 1861, only instead of the bayonet the ballot will be used to prevent repudiation and preserve the nation's honor. This is not a political sermon, but I want to warn those who would run the ship of state against the rocks of discredit and dishonor that Columbia would probably get the worst of it, and I would save generations ahead from misery and suffering. On that day also the Rev. Cortland Myers touched on politics in the Baptist Temple at Brooklyn. Among other things he said:

Mr. Myer's Opinion.

This pulpit is absolutely non-partisan, but it is positively patriotic and Christian. It does not stand for party, but as long as it stands for Christ it must stand for principle. The chief issues of this campaign directly affect the Gospel of Christ of Calvary. I must be heard and will be heard against all dishonesty and anarchy and kindred evil. I love the blood-stained banner of the cross, and it is ever in danger. I love every stripe and every star of Old Glory, and it is at this moment in danger. I must speak every Sunday from now until November. I shall denounce the Chicago platform. That platform was made in hell. Dishonesty never came from heaven; anarchy never came from heaven: class making and disunion never came from that upper world. Its silence concerning the greatest evil on the American continent was not inspired from above.

The 13th seemed to be a good day for denouncing bimetallists. Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., at the Academy of Music, New York, said:

Mr. Dixon's Opinion.

I am not going to talk partisan politics this morning. I am going to stick close to the Bible. Thou shalt not steal. After thirteen years of study of sociology, I must confess that I do not know very much about it, but I do know honesty from dishonesty. I may not understand the technique of finance, but I do understand results. Any hen may lay an egg, and while I may not know the technique by which that egg is laid, I seriously maintain that I am a better judge of eggs than all the hens in the country. And I know honesty from dishonesty as well as any financier. The proposition that the nation shall, independently of every consideration of honesty, take 53 cents' worth of silver and coin it into a dollar, and force every one by its authority, backed up by its armies, to accept it as such-that is the proposition which is put before us. For whose benefit, in God's name? For that of the millionaire silver mine owner. The ratio of 16 to 1 is not only a false, dishonest one, but demagogues have used the phrase to make the ignorant believe all sorts of things. Why, down in Virginia, where I live, there are some who believe that the election of Bryan means that every man is to get a present from the Government of sixteen dollars. One man at the next station called at the Adams Express office to inquire whether his sixteen dollars would be delivered, or if he would have to call for it. A man has been arrested in New Jersey and now lies in jail, awaiting the action of the grand jury, for the crime of passing trade dollars, containing the

stamp of the Government-dollars with more silver in them than there is in Mr. Bryan's dollar. Technically his crime is uttering a counterfeit, because the Government has not guaranteed to pay a dollar for those dollars. Now they want to coin a dollar, and make you take it whether you have sense or not, which is no dollar at all, only fifty-three cents. In other words, the Government is to go into the counterfeiting business. I am not talking politics, but going back to Moses. It is a gigantic jest to say that the value of silver will rise by the passage of the free silver law. It did not rise when the mine owners forced a servile government to buy first two millions of their product a month, and afterward four and a half millions. Even if silver did rise, the purchasing power would go down. In either case the value of labor would be reduced onehalf. Mr. Bryan is impaled on one or the other of these two horns of a dilemma. If free silver becomes the law, $600,000,000 worth of gold will disappear from circulation. That is contraction. A panic will follow. Mr. Bryan admits it. He says we need heroic action. The only way to save the nation from a panic, according to him, is to give it another one. "Thou shalt not steal." We have borrowed money, and we have given the pledge of seventy million people that we shall repay it. If I borrowed from the devil in hell, it would be the part of honesty to pay him back in as good coin as that he loaned me. If those who loan to us in our distress are as black as they are painted, if they are thieves and Shylocks, we are still under obligations to pay back to them as good money as we got.

The New York World, of October 5, in speaking of the sermon delivered by Mr. Dixon the day before, said:

When he called Bryan “a mouching, iobbering demagogue, whose patriotism was all in his jaw-bone," the audience howled.

September 27th, Dr. Talmage, in a sermon delivered at his church in Washington, said:

Dr. Talmage's Remarks.

This country has been for the most part passing through crises, and after each crisis it is better off than before, and now we are at another crisis. We are told on the one hand that if gold is kept as a standard and silver is not elevated, confidence will be restored, and this nation will rise triumphantly from all the financial misfortunes that have been afflicting us. On the other hand, we are told that if the free coinage of silver is allowed all the wheels of business will revolve, the poor man will have a better chance, and all our industries will begin to hum and roar.

During the last six Presidential elections I have been urged to enter the political arena, but I never have and never will turn the pulpit in which I preach into a political stump. Every minister must do as he feels called to do, and I will not criticise him for doing what he considers his duty; but all the political harangues from pulpits from now until the third of November will not in all the United States change one vote.

But good morals, honesty, loyalty, Christian patriotism and the ten commandments-these we must preach. If ever this country needed the divine rescue, it needs it now. Never within my mmory have so many people literally

starved to death as in the past few months. Have you noticed in the newspapers how many men and women here and there have been found dead, the post mortem examination stating that the cause of death was hunger? There is not a day when we do not hear the crash of some great commercial establishment, and as a consequence many people are thrown out of employment. Among what we considered comfortable homes have come privation and close calculation, and an economy that kills. Millions of people who say nothing about it are at this moment at their wits' end.

There are millions of people who do not want charity, but want work. The cry has gone up to the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth and the prayer will be heard and relief will come. If we have nothing better to depend upon than American politics, relief will never come. Whoever is to be elected to the Presidency, the wheels of Government turn so slowly, and a caucus in yonder white building on the hill may tie the hands of any President.

As I said before, our cause was supported by ministers and laymen of all denominations, Catholic and Protestant, but I quote some of the hostile criticisms in order to show the feeling of bitterness which existed in some quarters.

While it was not pleasant to be so severely censured from the pulpit, I recall the fact that on every great political question ministers have differed from each other; their arguments must stand upon their own merits and their political opinions must be measured by the same rules by which we measure the political opinions of others.

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