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speak more accurately, the tariff had lost its mystery as an economical problem, and had become one of those every-day questions, comprehensive to everyone who had heads to shelter, mouths to feed, and backs to clothe.

But it was not so with the financial question. The averment was that low prices, hard times, and every cognate ill, was due to the demonitization of silver, and would flee away under the spell of free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. But who arose to prove all this? It never at any time passed beyond the stage of vehement and plausible averment. And who understood all this? Certainly not the average voter to whom it was first introduced. Demonitization to him was the veriest Greek, and 16 to 1 was a Chinese puzzle. Ratios were as nothing compared with bread and butter.

On the other hand the averment was that free silver coinage meant the repudiation of debts, the scaling of prices and wages, the introduction of panic, the destruction of credits, universal bankruptcy and demoralization. Admitting it all, still men would ask, how then comes it that so many advocates of disaster are found in the country? How could these calamity seekers walk into a great conservative and patriotic convention and walk away with it bodily? How could they make so many and such easy converts in so short a time? Surely there must be some misrepresentation of a situation which proves so alluring and potential as to attract and hold as this one does! It cannot be that the multitude are so filled with the Gadarene spirit as to wish to rush over the precipice into the sea!

All along in the campaign it has been the wish of

every man of patriotic instincts, and the expectation of parties, that the leading issues, as already foreshadowed, should never be lost sight of, but should be persistently fought to a finish. As the country has seen, dalliance with a great economic and industrial problem, like the tariff, is destructive of energies and hopes, subversive of investment and enterprise, and quite as costly in the end as actual war.

The same can be truthfully said of agitation respecting the country's currency and finances, especially when such agitation is suddenly sprung by those who oppose the established usages of credit and exchange, and who favor radical departures in the interest of debtor and against creditor. If they are right, the quicker they establish the fact the better. The individual creditor, the savings bank, the building association, the bank of deposit, the stock-and-bond-owing corporation, the pensioner, the day laborer, are all in suspense, 'till they know whether what they are entitled to is above or below par. If they are wrong, let the verdict be emphatic, so that they will not soon return to vex the country with sophistries, distract it with contentions, threaten it with sectional division, or endanger it with internal convulsion. Let the campaign be hard and earnest; let the lines be clear and strong; let the result be an explosion forever of wrong thought and dangerous principle, and the permanent establishment of right doctrine and righteous aspiration, no matter what the standard upon which they are inscribed.

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The popular vote was-Cleveland. Democrat, 5.545.227: Harrison, Republican, 8,126.478; Weaver, Populist, 1,125,842: Bidwell, Prohibitionist, 262,386.

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