tions. If Mr. Bryan after the campaign of 1900 had compromised his principles, slackened his efforts, or manifested pessimism or ill temper he would have passed into history as another example of a man who lacked moral reserve for the supreme crisis. But he did none of these things. In consequence since 1900 his power has expanded and matured so that he has taken his place as a sort of patriarch, after the fashion of Washington or Jefferson. From this pedestal nothing at all probable can dethrone him. Of what value he is and will be to the country and the world the intuitive mind will not fail to discern. The democratic platform of 1896 was the molten expression of pent up wrath against evils conterminous with the government itself. The tariff and taxation, bonds and money, the federal courts, the rights of the states are subjects which have occupied political thought in America since the days of Washington. There was nothing novel in this platform and nothing in it to suggest revolutionary designs. There was nothing in it out of harmony with previous platforms of the democratic party. Many of its clauses accorded with platforms of the republican party itself in the days of its beginning. The tempest of villification and mendacity which rose against it can be explained only upon the ground that it was rightly accepted as the sincere declaration of men in sober earnest, who meant exactly what they said and who meant to put their principles into practice if given power to do so. Special privilege was confronted by a powerful and resolute foe, and the best weapons of special privilege, as it turned out, were those things which confused the public memory, prejudiced the public conscience, and subdued the moral energies of the people. The historian who shall depict in comprehensive form that memorable campaign will not fail to note the ardor with which the republican party clasped Mr. Cleveland to its breast because the regenerated democratic party had cast him out, although no one had been more cordially despised by the republican party or more bitterly assailed by its press up to that time. Nor can that historian overlook the organized hypocrisy of the banks, the insurance companies and the monopolies of the country who presented the spectacle of the streets of the great cities of the country gaudily filled with the American flag while the air resounded everywhere with the multitudinous strains of patriotic music for which the monopolists paid the bill. Nothing so brazen and upon such a gigantic scale had ever before been known in this country. It was intended to be a sort of psychical hurricane, by which the people should be swept off their feet in spite of themselves. It very largely helped to accomplish the result that ensued. What was worst the very money which went to the undoing of the people had been taken from them by the wretched swindling of these corporations practiced for at least a third of a century. The barest reference to history will show that the democratic platform of 1896 proceeded along familiar and creditable lines. Upon the tariff question Mr. Cleveland had been elected president in 1884 and 1892. Free trade or tariff for revenue only had been an article of the democratic faith since the time of Jefferson himself. It was not the tariff plank in the platform which could have honestly excited horror for the "monstrous birth" of the Chicago Convention. As to the income tax our own polity was familiar with such a method of raising revenue. This, therefore, was not strange and forbidding. It was not essentially populistic. The Chicago platform denounced banks of issue. But Jackson was elected president twice because of his opposition to a bank of issue. In this particular then, the platform, fulfilled the requirements of the critics who were clamoring for "his toric democracy." There was nothing either novel or improper in the clause of the platform which referred to the Supreme Court and its decision in the income tax case. The republican platform of 1860 contained serious strictures upon the democratic party for using the federal courts to enforce "the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest." It denounced "perversions of judicial power." The platform denounced the sending of troops into Illinois during the railroad strike of 1894 in language which was a dilute of similar language in the republican platform of 1860, which referred to the "lawless invasion, by armed force, of the soil of any state or territory as among the worst of crimes." What was here therefore to shock the sensibilities of Mr. McKinley and his party, many of whom had supported the republican platform of 1860? And finally as the republican platform of 1892 had declared for bimetallism, and as Mr. McKinley had vigorously criticised Mr. Cleveland for "dishonoring one of the precious metals;" as the democratic platform of 1892 had declared that "we hold to the use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country and to the coinage of both gold and silver, without discriminating against either metal" there was nothing in the money plank of the platform of 1896 to alienate any voter unless it inspired the fear that what both parties had up to that time ostensibly favored was on the point of coming to pass. Somehow in the logic of the world's affairs, resulting perhaps from the power of special privilege and its methods of dissimulation, every trespass upon the rights of man, every reaction toward a discarded injustice can for the time being be set out to masquerade as law or progress. The protective tariff, the national banks, the single gold standard, the great monopolies, the return to militarism and the disregard of the line which divides state from national sovereignty have come to pass through stealth, mendacity and force. It is marvelous, indeed, that any considerable number of men could be made to believe that the readoption of the constitution in its essential form and vigor and the overthrow of these evils was dangerous radicalism or smacked of revolution. If a body of men, like those under John Brown, forcibly assail the "constituted authorities" the offense can be easily designated. If riots occur, if disorder prevails as the result of economic conditions, as a protest against the system, which unjustly distributes to the few wealth beyond their power to use, and to the many less of the means of life than they earn or need, it is still riot and disorder and subject to the courts or the military. Yet a few men who have been able, through one fortune or another, to name the occupants of the several departments of the government, may do infinitely worse things than these and stifle all criticism through the press and the pulpit. This they did in 1896 to an extent never before known except during the time of the war between the states. When special privilege controls the congress, the president and the supreme court no obstacle exists to the passage of any desirable law and to the validation of the law, because it is desirable. But it will require something more than the out-worn jargon of insolent power to persuade reasonable men to believe that that law is sacred, or that an act done in its name is essentially different from an act done without a law, but which is equally violative of the deeper ethical law. So it was in 1896 that men who had taken an oath to support the constitution, but who had maliciously done everything in their power to undermine the republican system, took upon themselves the protection of national honor. The platform of 1896 was denominated revolutionary by those who had themselves revolutionized the government of the United States. To re-establish justice and to re-secure the blessings of liberty were revolutionary ends in the eyes of a party which has established injustice and made the blessings of liberty difficult to ourselves and doubtful to our posterity. Hence it was that Mr. Bryan was assailed in the open and from ambush by every weapon of stupidity, hypocrisy or studied hatred. There was no catch word stimulative of the barbaric prejudices of the mind, which were not raised against him. He not only came through it all unscathed, but with a fore |