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D

THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD.

LONDON, August 1, 1896. "So hell has been let loose at Chicago!" The Event of said to me the other day a keen poliChicago. tical student and recluse who drew, like most Englishmen, his impression of what goes on in the United States from the telegrams

He is

of Mr. Smalley in the Times. The expression, although strong, condenses into a line the virus and venom of Mr. Smalley's communications. Mr. Smalley is a man to whom all enthusiasm is abhorrent. He did good service in the Venezuelan crisis. doing bad service to-day. Possessed of a rostrum from which he might interpret the New World to the Old, he is abusing it by caricaturing, reviling and generally playing the mischief to the uttermost of his power by representing one-half of the American nation -which may prove to be the larger half -as if it were a mob of criminal lunatics. I am glad to be able to publish

From the Arena.]

fame, however, is now secure enough. As a disturber of old parties, a pathfinder where political issues were mixed and mazy, an agitator with a genius for exposition so great as to sway public opinion from the Alleghanies to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Harvey has made it certain and inevitable that his name must be for ever connected with one of the most remarkable chapters in the political history of his country. Never since 1860,-perhaps it might be true to say that not even then, or at any previous

[graphic]

UNCLE SAM'S CROWN OF THORNS.

a valuable corrective to the wild and whirling invective of the Times correspondent in the sedate and well-informed description of the situation which I have from the pen of Dr. Shaw, of the American Review of Reviews. Dr. Shaw thus describes the Event of Chicago, and explains its genesis and its significance :

About two years ago there appeared in Chicago a little book entitled "Coin's Financial School." Its author was a certain Mr. Harvey, at that time unknown to fame. Mr. Harvey's

time in our political life, -has there been a great party gathering comparable, for intensity of feeling, for concentration of purpose, for superiority to mere personal aims or to mere traditional party prejudices, and for genuine fervour in behalf of specific proposals touching public policy, with the recent Democratic Convention at Chicago. As a precipitant and a crystallising reagent nothing else was half so effective as the entry of Mr. Harvey with his little yellow-covered book.

The real centre of education and influence was Mr. Harvey with his little book; and if there was any conscious forethought or method in the evolution of the great wave of free-silver enthusiasm which has swept across the South and West, it consisted chiefly in the multiplication of the presses which were printing Mr. Harvey's books, and in the systematic dissemination of copies by the million instead of the hundred thousand.

So far as the question of silver, pure and simple, is concerned,apart from vague unrest and general discontent, and apart from a widespread belief that some sort of monetary and financial reforms are needed,-there has never been a time since the battle of the standards began several decades ago when the cause of silver seemed so hopeless and so little justified by facts and circumstances as it seemed only the day before yesterday, so to speak. The outlook for silver had never been so discouraging. The Sherman Act had been repealed. The two great parties were both committed by their platforms of 1892 to the maintenance of every dollar issued by the government at full par with gold. The free-silver sentiment seemed to be confined to the Western mining camps and to the Populists of the sub-arid belt. Mr. Cleveland's administration was congratulating itself that it had for ever vanquished the free-silver forces, had established the gold standard beyond the possibility of dangerous assault, and

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