look defiant

an effort that was a miserable failure. Outside the door he burst into tears and cursed his fate, saying that his career was run and his reputation for patriotism blasted. He was in despair. And he was desperate. His friends kept him concealed several days. From that day he did not have his old bearing in the Senate. His demeanor was apologetic and conciliatory. In fact, his public career may be said to have ended that day.

V.

Ingalls secured third term as United States Senator without trouble. This term expired at a sorry time for the brilliant Senator. That grotesque political movement known as populism was in full blast. Nothing like it was ever seen in America.

The populist uprising was a political revolution that failed. It was begotten of oppression and born of an appeal for justice. It was a protest against gross and long-continued usurpation of the rights of the people by lawless and predatory combinations of criminals and freebooters intrenched in all the departments of the govern

ment. It was conceived in righteousness, but born to misfortune. Its sansculottic wet-nurses proved self-seeking vagabonds with confiscatory proclivities. Wild-eyed, abnormally bearded, peculiarly garbed, they went forth proclaiming preposterous remedies for a sick nation. These political streetwalkers sacrificed the revolution for the spoils of office, to obtain which they "fused" with the very principles against which their party had risen. Many of the reforms sought by the honest minority have, happily, been incorporated in state and national statutes. The blatant demagogues, the criminals, the blackmailers of insurance companies and other business institutions found to be at their mercy, held high carnival over their carrion for a season, then slunk back into that obscurity from which they had emerged.

The movement became a contagious psychological disorder. Women loud of mouth and brazen of face became political crusaders and paraded up and down the land in frenzy and dishabille. Tribunes were raised, and from these a succession of bewhiskered orators poured a continuous stream of monotonous balderdash which was heralded by waiting multitudes of mediocre rustics

and devotees as the gospel of human rights and political freedom- that is, the NEW gospel. The tail of some crazy comet must have beclouded the earth. The rankest demagogue was acclaimed the greatest patriot. Indians joined in the frenzy and set to ghost-dancing and the practice of incantation to restore their lost domains and bring back the buffalo a course far more intelligent and reasonable than that of the hypnotic pale-face he imitated. Coxey armies marched thousands of miles to Washington to protest against fancied invasions of man's primitive liberties only to be ordered off the grass by truckling English menials and lawn-cutters with exaggerated notions of their functions. One slatternly jade announced that she had been made a Freemason, and in a feast at the close of the Red Cross work in a lodge in Kansas City, Kansas, the following toast was proposed by a waggish member: "Here's to Mary Yellin, the Knight of the Red C!" Of her Ingalls wrote to Ware "I have never mentioned that female's (?) name, and I suspect this silence irritates her perhaps more than speech, and then, too, a man is always at great disadvantage in any altercation with any person

wearing feminine garb, no matter what the sex may be".

Ingalls saw the rising cloud when it was no bigger than a man's hand. His friends also saw it and entreated him to lead in a movement to confine it to a faction of his party-something which might have been accomplished. So far did he heed these admonitions as to prepare an address to be delivered at some proper place in the April before the election of the Legislature. But he was in doubt and hesitated until the psychic moment had passed one instance where not only Opportunity but his friends hung on him for weeks, but he did not rise. Writing to Ware he said:

I suppose I ought to be grateful to the cabal of Democrats, Greenbackers, political cl-p-doctors, and bunco-steerers, for being the first to formally nominate me for a fourth term in the Senate! That they did not represent the sentiments of the Republican farmers of Kansas in their fulminations against me I have already many gratifying assurances. Of course nobody can predict, I mean foretell, what will happen politically, but I shall be greatly surprised if the people of Kansas stultify themselves by deliber

ately adopting such prescriptions as these quacks and Sarsaparilla physicians have written. With many demands of the Alliance I sympathize Silver, more currency, cheaper transportation, tariff revision, and the suppression of the trusts, monopolies, grain gambling, &c., but I pause at the frontier.

When hope of election was well-nigh gone he delivered that address in the Senate and labeled it "The Image and Superscription of Caesar". It excited derision only, when, if it had been proclaimed in time, it might have turned the tide.

But in this crisis of his affairs Ingalls bore himself well. He did not fail to see the ridiculous, as he always did, writing to Ware concerning a "terrifying letter from an agitated person at Fort Scott: "I should say on general principles that any man who asserted that there was not a 'vertious' woman in the land deserved to be knocked down in Topeka or anywhere else. The battery could be justified by an appeal to Lindley Murray".

Over-zealous friends urged him to the use of money, but the day when York dramatically placed $7,000 on the Speaker's desk stood out

1