THE FIRST BATTLE. CHAPTER I. MY CONNECTION WITH THE SILVER QUESTION BEGINS. N the 30th day of July, 1890, I was nominated for Congress in the First Nebraska District by the Democratic party. The platform adopted by the nominating Convention contained the following silver plank: We demand the free coinage of silver on equal terms with gold and denounce the effort of the Republican party to serve the interests of Wall street as against the rights of the people. I wrote the plank and it expressed my views at that time. The Democratic party in Congress had, only a short time before the holding of our Convention, voted strongly in favor of free coinage and my opponent, Hon. W. J. Connell, had voted with the Democrats. Since we agreed upon the silver question, we confined our campaign almost entirely to the discussion of the McKinley tariff act, for which he had voted When I spoke upon the silver question at all it was only briefly and the argument made was, in substance, that we needed more money rather than less and that the use of both metals for standard money would give more money than the use of one alone. After the election I determined to make a thorough study of the money question. The first thing read was a little pamphlet issued by the Bimetallic League and entitled "Silver in the Fifty-first Congress." Professor Laughlin's book on bimetallism was next read and afterwards, the "Report of the Royal Commission of England" and the works of Jevons, Bonamy Price, Cernuschi, De Laveleye, Chevelier, Jacobs and others. By this time the agitation upon the question. had reached a point where people were dividing upon the subject and I was pained to find my opinion running contrary to the opinions of many with whom I have been politically intimate, but the more I investigated the question the deeper my convictions became. In April, 1891, I attended the Western States' Commercial Congress in session at Kansas City, Mo., and there voted for free coinage |