that the Nebraskan orator addressed himself when speaking at Tammany Hall on September 29:

The Trusts of this country with their representatives are collecting tribute from the people; and when we protest against it, they call us disturbers of the peace and Anarchists. I am opposed to Trusts. As an executive I shall use what power I have to drive every Trust out of existence. If present laws are not sufficient to meet this evil, I, if elected, will recommend such laws as will. If the Constitution of the United States is so construed as to prevent any interference with the operation of the Trust, I shall recommend such amendment in the Constitution as will permit the punishment of these men. My friends, there is a great contest in this country, which must be settled, and that is, whether a few men, banded together, are more powerful than all the people.'

The tyrannical and dishonest way in which the great railway companies have exercised their extensive powers has long been another subject of invective. The Inter-State Commerce Act was specially designed to control them, and President Cleveland, during his first administration, compelled them to surrender large tracts of public land which had been granted to them in order to establish homesteads, and which they had let to large ranching associations. Senator Campbell's speech on the Inter-State Commerce Act is an example of the light in which these great corporations have been presented to the public:

These corporations have robbed their stockholders, ruined their builders, discriminated against shippers, fostered monopolies, oppressed producers, stolen Government subsidies, misappropriated public lands, evaded taxes, corrupted the administration of justice, increased their tolls beyond the point of endurance in order to pay extravagant salaries and dividends on watered stock. They have heartlessly disregarded the lives and safety of their passengers, and are notorious for overworking and underpaying their employees. Their rapacity and brutality have become a byeword in the land.'

This language may be neither fair nor sincere, but it explains the sort of interpretation Mr. Bryan's hearers would be ready to put on a parable like that of the hogs in Iowa. If this is the spirit in which the people have come to regard their employers, we cannot be surprised at the applause which Mr. Bryan obtains when he asks, as he did at Hornellsville, 'If financiers can make business out of politics, why cannot the great mass of the people for once make a business out of politics?'

In the same speech he said: "They tell you that the Government must redeem all its obligations in gold. Who said so? No

law

law ever said so. No law is on the Statute-book to-day that ever said so.' This is an example of the mode in which he continues to stimulate the dishonest inclinations of his followers. He has never actually declared it to be his policy to pay all debts in silver, but in every important speech he has made except that at Madison Square he holds out this lure to popular cupidity. He argues over and over again that the nation would be quite justified in paying its debts in silver. There is a formidable contrast between the oratory of Mr. Bryan and Senator Tillman for instance. The brutal violence of the latter only attracts the sympathy of angry prejudice, but Mr. Bryan never loses his temper. He is too pious to get into a passion. His object is to protect his friend the working man from having to pay his debts, and this is a business to be pursued with all calmness and deliberation. He is the assiduous man of business, the self-appointed attorney of the impecunious son of toil.

As the time of polling draws near this aspect of his canvass becomes more manifest, and each week has given fresh proofs of his complete ascendency over the Democratic machine. In not a single State has the old local organization of the party been able to resist him. The local committee or caucus is no guarantee of the actual voting. It consists of professional politicians, elected by their retainers or their wealthy subscribers. In New York the people who attend these party meetings to elect delegates are not 9 per cent. of the party voters in the district; but it is still a proof of the thoroughness with which the campaign has been carried on that, although nearly all the wealthy Democrats and an enormous majority of the members of the party known in public life have repudiated Bryan, in every State the party convention has gone over to the Silverites. His success in securing the New York Convention recently held at Buffalo is perhaps the most signal proof of this subterranean force. Tammany and the County societies had all joined in defence of the gold standard in the early part of the summer. After the Chicago Convention Senator Hill endeavoured to save his position in the party by observing strict neutrality. He and his friends announced that nothing would be settled until the meeting of the State Convention at the end of September, and the elections for this were proceeding on the understanding that the delegates when they met should settle what was to be done. Then Mr. Bryan towards the conclusion of his tour through the State took up the question, and at Ripley gave the world an interesting picture of the lines on which his party has worked since it met at Memphis in 1895.

Vol. 184.-No. 368.

'The advocates of free coinage have won by carrying their cause not to conventions, but to the people themselves, the source of all political power.'

'We did not wait for the Convention at Chicago. We saw that the strength of bimetallism was in the rank and file of the party, and recognised the democratic idea that power comes up to the machinery from the people themselves, and does not go down from the machinery to the people. We commenced with the sovereigns, and we instructed the delegates from primaries to the precincts, and from the precincts to the county, and from the county to the State, and from the States to the National Convention. . .

'Let no man go to any convention until you know where he stands upon this question. When you find a man who refuses to tell you what he is going to do, who will not take you into his confidence, tell him that no power on earth can get you to take him into your confidence. The men who assemble at conventions do not go there as individuals; they go as representatives. They do not go to act for themselves; they go to act for you who sent them. And you not only have a right to know what a man is going to do when he gets there, but you have a right to tell him what to do and to bind him with instructions to do it. . . .

That is the way in which this fight has been carried on. It is the way in which this fight must be carried on if the people are to have their wish expressed in convention.'

Mr. Cleveland told the Democrats in June that a party convention was not a piece of machinery, but an opportunity for consultation'; but this was not the Jacobin view, neither is it that of Mr. Bryan, and the Ripley speech had an immediate effect. The delegates were all pledged to support Bryan and free coinage. On the point of unlimited silver no reservation was permitted in the ranks of the party. Not only is New York State the great centre of the wealth and commerce of the Union; it produces also the oldest and most powerful Democratic organizations in the Northern States. Yet, in spite of the resistance of the leaders, the whole of the workers' of the party move to Mr. Bryan's orders like a regiment on parade. Such successes within five weeks of the poll may not, and probably will not, bring victory, but they show that we are still far from that collapse of the Silver party expected in the summer, and they indicate a social disorder which must inevitably continue in activity long after the election.

INDEX

TO THE

HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FOURTH VOLUME OF
THE QUARTERLY REVIEW.